Songfacts®:

• "The Garden Wheel" is the closing track of People Who Aren't There Anymore, the seventh album by Future Islands. The song serves as a melancholic epilogue to the record, a chronicle of the dissolution of frontman Samuel T. Herring's long-distance relationship with Swedish actress Julia Ragnarsson across the worldwide COVID-19 lockdown.
• The song reflects on the emotional wreckage left behind. Herring's signature baritone aches with questions like "How am I supposed to feel?" Adrift in a sea of loss, he searches for answers in the changing seasons and the natural world around him.
  
  "I had a conversation with my ex to ask her if it was OK to sing about the end. She told me she wouldn't ever deny me my art," he told Uncut magazine. "That allowed me to feel I could go deeper."
  
  At that point Herring had only written the penultimate track "The Sickness" and shared it with Ragnarsson. "That was a strange conversation, although necessary. It felt like it was its own ending," he said.
• The imagery in "The Garden Wheel" is vivid. Cardinals flit through a garden, turning the "autumn wheel," a symbolic image of the relentless cycle of change. The "onions peel," a metaphor for the layers of pain being peeled back. The harvest, a symbol of what was once fruitful, now feels like the "hardest" one yet.
  
  The rhythms of nature as love and loss is one of Herring's favorite motifs. Breakthrough track "Seasons (Waiting On You)" compares the growth of a relationship to summer and the aftermath to its end as winter.
• People Who Aren't There Anymore grapples with the lingering aftershocks of a world upended. For Herring, the record doesn't fall neatly into the pre- or post-pandemic boxes. "The first half of the album was written within the pandemic," he told Apple Music's Hanuman Welch. "The second half was written after we did our first tour back. So this really elongated space with plenty of time to forget what we're going through, but still being in it."
  
  This extended period of reflection seems to have informed the album's core theme: navigating a world forever altered. Herring describes it as a collective reckoning, "a sense of how much the world has changed" since 2020.
• Produced by the band themselves alongside longtime collaborator Steve Wright, People Who Aren't There Anymore benefits from the familiar touch. Mixing duties are shared with Chris Coady, who helmed Future Island's breakthrough album, Singles, adding a touch of nostalgia to the mix.
• The People Who Aren't There Anymore title is borrowed from a haunting painting by Albuquerque artist Beedallo (a dedicated Future Islands fan himself). This theme is further echoed in the cover art, another of Beedallo's works titled Fading Memory Of A Face. The hazy, somber imagery captures the introspective reflections that lie at the heart of the album.