Polymorphing

Album: Moth (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is an ode to Tokyo pop star Tatsuro Yamashita. Chairlift's Caroline Polachek explained to Billboard magazine: "I had heard his music for the first time in 2012 and loved how feel-good it was. I love how he's not careful with the vocals, how he really flings them around even as he sings on top of a band that is so surgically precise. That said, we did not approach this song with surgical precision [laughs]."

    She added: "I wanted it to feel as if you were listening to another language. It's not really about anything other than that feeling of gushy-ness and mania."
  • Tatsuro Yamashita released his first record in 1976 and is one of the most commercially successful Japanese male solo recording artists, selling approximately nine million albums in total. He is best known for his 1983 song "Christmas Eve", which is was his only Japanese #1 hit and is considered one of his country's standard festive tunes.
  • The song ends with a scream. Polachek said: "That scream was really funny, actually. We'd borrowed a mic that day from our friend Ben Goldwasser [of MGMT] and tracked a scream using it. We sent him an MP3 that had a lot silence and then a really loud scream as a practical joke. But it did make the album."
  • This was mixed by Mick Guzauski, who used to work on the Earth, Wind & Fire records.

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