Songfacts®:

• The first single from Dirty Projectors' sixth album, Swing Lo Magellan, finds frontman Dave Longstreth singing about the powerless population. "But now the banks are closed," he croons. "And nothing gets bigger. The crowd will yell but the gun has no trigger." He told The Guardian the song is "an oblique portrait of America." The song was released on March 30, 2012.
• Longstreth discussed the tune's meaning with Tonedeaf.com describing it as "an abstract and metaphorical song." "When I wrote the lyrics I wasn't sure what they were about," he explained. "And the recorded performance on this song was the first time I was singing the song, saying the lyrics. Some of the words are not even real words or mispronounced because I didn't entirely know them."
  
  "The song is about the nature of protesting, and what a protest could be in a world in which protesting just becomes a spectacle of protest," Longstreth continued. "Which affirms the notion that we're facing a larger morass where we are protesting against this circular system, and it's impossible to imagine an alternative."
  
  "The song is about a frustration - where it's even impossible to commit suicide," he concluded. "You hold a gun but it doesn't have a trigger. You can't actually kill yourself with the gun, you can only flash it around."