Songfacts®:

• Vocalist Samuel T Herring explained this song's meaning to Uncut magazine: "It's a song about the human experience," he said. "It's about love, letting go, learning from your mistakes and always feeling that pull – yearning for a certain love, as time goes by in seasons change."
• Future Islands made their network television debut on March 3, 2014, when they performed this song on The Late Show with David Letterman. Letterman shouted "I'll take all of that you got!" following the band's passionate performance, creating a meme along the way.
  
  "I remember before the show, looking at some of the previous Letterman performances online and how many views they got, and I was like, 'Oh that's cool, 5,000 views or so!'" Herring recalled to Billboard magazine. "None of us own TVs, and it's been forever since we watched a late show. We didn't really expect that it would become something, because nobody thought that performance would get that reaction."
• Herring told Billboard magazine the story of the song. "I called the guys the day after we wrote it, probably jammed the tune out in an hour and a half," he recalled. "I went home and took a recording I had made on my computer, wrote the song in 30 minutes by chopping it up and then called the guys and was like, 'This is the best song we've ever written.'"
  
  "Of course, by the time we wrote the rest of the songs (on the album), I was like, 'Maybe it's not the best song we've ever written," Herring added. "I love these other songs too.'"
• Time Out magazine chose this as their best song of 2014. They said: "A stunning lovelorn lament, inescapably drenched in experience, 'Seasons' was confirmation that music could still be moving, that bands could still break through after years of toil and that in a tough year, the rock 'n' roll dream wasn't totally dead after all."
• The song sums up a tumultuous two-and-a-half year relationship. Herring told NME: "I was trying to get her to change so that she would love me the way I wanted to be loved. And I tried to change too, until I realized that you can't do that. That's just one of those tragedies of love: it's not always going to work out, even if there is something there."
• Herring explained the song's meaning. "Seasons was an idea to explain the passage of time in a rocky relationship," he said. "It means as the winter falls apart, by the summer we'll feel love again. Then, as the winter comes, it will get rid of those things we're holding onto."