Songfacts®:

• Michael "Eyedea" Larsen (1981-2010) was an American underground rapper from St. Paul, Minneapolis who toured extensively as second MC and support DJ for Atmosphere. Eyedea died in his sleep on October 16, 2010. The cause of death was ruled by the Ramsey County medical examiner's office to be an accident, from "opiate toxicity."
• Atmosphere rapper Sean "Slug" Daley penned this song as a way of expressing the phases he went through when dealing with his pal's death. Asked by Artist Direct if it was a difficult song for him to write, he replied: "I think the most difficult part about making that track was the timing because you can't really force a song like that to come out. So, I had to wait for when it felt right to write. I was consistently being asked by fans and younger people like, 'When are you gonna make a song for Eyedea?' and 'Why don't you make a song for Eyedea? You owe us a song for Eyedea.' That's a weird pressure. What do you mean I owe you something about my feelings? You know what I mean? It's kind of a weird position to have people tell you, 'You owe us this, I can't believe you haven't done this yet,' without realizing this s—t doesn't just write itself. There's no switch that you can turn on and off. So for me, the difficult part was in waiting for when it happened."
  
  "Once I sat down to write it, no, it wasn't difficult to write because I could've written 12 songs about Eyedea," Slug continued. "It's one of those things where there's no way to fit it all in three verses. There's so much material that I actually had to figure out what material to use and what not to use to present the point I was trying to present. You know at the end of the day, the song 'Flicker' is not really about Eyedea. It's about me and my coping mechanisms. It's about me and discussing the different stages that I went through after he passed away, much like a song that I did from a few years ago that was called 'Yesterday'"