Songfacts®:

• Coheed frontman Claudio Sanchez and his wife decided to move from their country house in upstate New York and travel around into different situations before they started a family. One of the places they found themselves was in an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. However, Sanchez found it hard writing songs in this new location. He explained to Teamrock that this track is "basically a song to my wife, saying that she needed to hear me and understand that it wasn't working for me. I needed to leave and get back to the country, and that's essentially what Island is about – just the apartment being too small, and the exposure being too much for me."
• The song opens with the sound of the Q Train going into Brooklyn, which was the transport that Sanchez would travel on when going in and out of Brooklyn into Manhattan.
• Sanchez explained the track's instrumentation: "When I started the song it was all on acoustic, and that was the beginning of this idea of the album being a solo effort," he said. "But we transformed it into a rocker, and the guitar at the beginning claws into the idea of distance and landscape, which I really didn't have being in that apartment. I was longing for space, and the opening guitar line is supposed to resonate that."
  
  "Then the band comes in, and everything becomes tight and crunchy," Sanchez continued. "Again, that's meant to be a musical representation of the chaos I was experiencing inside the space of that apartment."
• The song's music video shows a pair of Times Square street entertainers dressed as Batman and Superman engaging in some smooching. "When I think of these two iconic characters, I think of opposite attraction," Sanchez explained. "I think of myself and my wife. How two opposite ends of a spectrum can create harmony and balance."
  
  "In one way or another, these characters have been paired up with like-minded love interests, the Bat and the Cat... The Alien and the Amazonian," he added. "I wanted to bring the Dark and the Light together."