Songfacts®:

• This epic tune clocks in at over eight minutes and was started by Adam Duritz in the early 2010s before being completed in a single sitting. He told us the story of the song in a 2013 interview: "I started writing it about two or three years ago. It was a piece of music that I was thinking about using for the play, which is why it was named 'Palisades Park' for no particular reason. Because it had to do with the play, a setting in the play. There were no words to it, but I had about five minutes of me playing and singing kind of nonsense words, going through all the different changes."
  
  "I pulled it out and I really loved it. I finally sat down and really worked at writing the whole thing. It took me a while - it took me a week and a half, and the guys were here. I really love it. It's my best piece of music I've written - it's beautiful."
  
  "It's really long. It's more like a 'Round Here' kind of song. It's a long song with different sections to it. It reminds me of the sort of stuff we do live, but on a record."
• Somewhere Under Wonderland producer Brian Deck played the glockenspiel on the track. Deck is based at Engine Studios in Chicago and has worked with such bands as Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine, Fruit Bats and Gomez.
• Duritz explained the song's meaning to TeamRock: "I was 27 the first time anyone from a record company even looked at a band I was in, and 28 when I got signed," he recalled. "The ten years before that that were really terrifying. But I was also having rich experience in my twenties, and Palisades Park celebrates that – being on the fringes, wanting to try on the wrong sex's clothing, and wanting to try PCP, which is a bad idea. But it's about that experimentation."