This song is about some sandhill cranes down in Florida who were mated for life. It’s still wild to me that J Mascis did the guitar solo on it. It was one of the last songs I wrote for this album, and a really fun song to record in the studio. “See You Better Now” is the most straightforward love song on the album, and definitely inspired by Tom Petty and Traveling Wilburys.
Big Peter Hook vibes going on, and Ryley Walker’s guitar playing on this tune just rules. I love how the bass solo in this song turned out.
This song is about dying and how the older you get the more life feels like it’s closing in on you. True story! Jeremy’s clarinet playing along with Mike’s pedal steel at the end is one of my favorite parts on the record. There’s also a vignette about someone briefly dying and coming back to life while fighting in the Bosnian War. At its core, this song is a metaphor for obsession, and the protagonist is completely in love with their alien abductor. This is one of the first songs I wrote for the album and was inspired by Signs and the show Surviving Death. It’s about a young person escaping a dangerous domestic situation in the Northeast and making her way down the coast to Florida. It’s a metaphor for love and obsession about someone visited by a ghost and feeling confused about their feelings for them. This song, like a few others on this record, takes place where I live and the field next to it. Definitely inspired by Sam Beam and Sparklehorse. I like the way the groove came together at the end. This song is about nostalgia and moving on, and I wrote it in the middle of winter. There were a couple moments like that in the recording process where a song just immediately fell into place as soon as we started playing it. This was one of the first songs we rehearsed together as a band in the studio, and David’s piano part felt great almost immediately. I knew pretty quickly that I wanted it to be a duet, and I’m super grateful to Julien for joining me on it. This is basically a love song told through the experience of someone having surgery. It’s one of the bigger tunes on the album, and I knew I wanted to start the album with a fuller sound-but as a whole, I wanted this album to avoid getting too huge. It’s about death, the afterlife, and all the mundane things before you get there. “Cahooting the Multiverse” is a microcosm of the album lyrically and musically.
With the album out today, stream along below as you read through Ross’ track-by-track breakdown of ILYSM’s 12 flavorful songs. The result is a patchwork of sounds centered in folk-rock ballads and baroque-indie revival informed by everything from the microfolk of Iron & Wine to the epic-scale shoegaze of Jesu. As an extension of the impressive balance they create together, Wild Pink manage to walk that tightrope with additional contributions from a diverse list of artists including Julien Baker, Ryley Walker, Yasmin Williams, Ratboys’ Julia Steiner, and J Mascis-the latter’s ripping guitar solo, like the raging riff that tears through the title track, managing to greatly expand the scope of the otherwise-fairly-tranquil heartland rock tune without pushing it into excess. Such is the case with Ross and co-producers Justin Pizzoferrato and Antlers frontman (and amateur mycologist, evidently) Peter Silberman. When walking us through his new LP with his band Wild Pink, John Ross immediately notes that the goal for ILYSM was to go big without “getting too huge.” It’s the kind of vague talk musicians and technicians tend to share in the studio, with destined collaborators often capable of somehow knowing exactly what the other means when they utter non-technical directions like this, their mutual language leading to a level of creativity rarely tapped by some of the most tightly knit musical teams.
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