Walking Paranoia

Album: Odd Soul (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • In our interview with Mutemath drummer, Darren King, it was revealed this song is about the paranoia which can emerge from a religious upbringing: "That song is all about how we were raised. You're raised in this scene where there's a lot of talk of demons and you just talk of the Rapture, and as a kid, when a little airplane would fly overhead and you'd hear the sound, I would literally run and go check to see if my mom was still there, because I wanted to make sure that that sonic boom wasn't the Rapture. And if it was, I knew my mom would be gone for sure, because she was the best person I knew. So if Mom got raptured, and I'm still around, then I'm in trouble. So it was this paranoia. Or if you look at a dirty magazine for the first time when you're 11 or 12, and then for the rest of that year you wonder if you're going to go to hell – that's a true story of mine – and then toil over that. And then I went back to the gas station and I tried to apologize to the gas station attention for looking at the dirty magazine, and it was a completely different person that owned the place, they didn't have dirty magazines anymore. Weird stuff like that."
  • "Walking Paranoia" features on Odd Soul, Mutemath's third album. King told us the entire record carries this theme of religious upbringing and social awkwardness: "Well, to me, it represents the idea that I'm strange. I mean, I remember growing up as a kid thinking that to be me, to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant teen, growing up in Missouri, was sort of the absence of culture. I thought that I was raised with a blank canvas regarding culture and that I had nothing in that regard. And then as I get older, I do start to see it differently. And I bear both this pride and also embarrassment for who I am culturally and religiously. And I feel strange. I feel like a weird person."

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