Songfacts®:

• Half Moon Run is a Montreal-based indie-rock band who wrote their fourth album, Salt, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With everyone taking stock of their priorities during the crisis, the group noticed many of their friends were uprooting their lives and leaving for greener pastures, which inspired the melancholy track "Everyone's Moving Out East." The band even lost one of their own - Isaac Symonds, a multi-instrumentalist who joined the group in 2012, announced his departure in 2020.
• Although they eventually chose to release this as a single, it took a while for the band to embrace the song.
  
  "The climate in the studio was such that, maybe it wasn't that good, maybe it wouldn't make the record," Portielje admitted in a 2023 Songfacts Podcast interview. "But when we did preliminary listen-backs with industry partners, it was very impactful and very emotional. People project parts of their own lives onto it and it makes some people weepy."
• The music video expounds upon the theme of letting go as the bandmates drive away from their old lives.
  
  "There's this intersection that it occupies somewhere between beauty, sadness, and yearning," Portielje told Songfacts of the concept. "It's kind of that feeling of someone you love going away, or maybe you're going away and you're leaving someone behind, or you want to go with someone but you can't. What if you're just driving away - and it's each of us individually in the same car, which is kind of counterintuitive, I know. It's a very simple concept, and surely something similar has been done before, but I think it pairs well and it elevates that feeling."
  
  The clip was directed by Mailis, a Montreal-based director who also helmed videos for Canadian-pop artist Laroie ("Can't Let Go," "Speed Of Life").
• Making an album during a pandemic was challenging, but Half Moon Run discovered the restrictions were actually a boon to their creativity. Because of a government-mandated curfew that forced them to end their sessions by 8 p.m., they had to make the most of their time together.
  
  "It was really fun to do, but also, there was not much else to do," Portielje told Cult MTL magazine in 2023. "It was a great pressure valve release. It was very exciting, and it would get more exciting the
  closer we got to the limit. The fact that we had to leave at a certain time, urgently, or else we'd get a fine or arrested or whatever they were going to do, it made it that riffs (become) forbidden riffs that we must play one more time!"