Songfacts®:

• After the release of their second album, At Dawn, Kentucky-based indie-rockers My Morning Jacket were eager to hit the road in their new van named Rosie. According to lead singer Jim James, the introspective track "Golden" from their subsequent album, It Still Moves, is about the band's excitement of pursuing their dream and the dedication of the people back home who support them.
  
  "The first half of the song is about the wide-eyed enthusiasm you have as a young musician out on the road and experiencing all this stuff and letting it all flash in," he explained in My Morning Jacket's 2011 VH1 Storytellers episode. "The second half of the song is the character in the song trying to balance the love in his life with the music and the adventure and trying to balance home and away. Being fortunate enough to be with someone who was dedicated and said if you'll be here for me, I'll be here for you no matter what happens. If it works or if it doesn't work out, it's all good. And it's so special to find somebody like that."
• When the band was getting ready to go on tour, they knew a lot of bar gigs were in their future. The song's hook describes bars as lonely places that seduce their patrons into wasting their lives away. The sentiment was inspired by James' grandmother, who wasn't a fan of him hanging out in seedy locales.
  
  He recalled in a Pandora Stories feature: "I wrote this song on Thanksgiving night a long time ago. I was leaving my grandmother's house and she asked me where I was going. I told her I was going to some bar to meet some friends, and she said, 'The bars are dark and lonely and filled with people that don't care about you!' She was trying to get me to not go to the bar in her sweet way. That started me thinking about that and the song."
• It Still Moves is the last MMJ album with original guitarist Johnny Quaid and keyboardist Danny Cash. It was also the final album the band recorded on Quaid's grandparents' farm in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Instead, they ventured out to the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York to record their next album, Z, which marked a stylistic shift that pushed further into experimentation with psychedelic rock, space rock, and rock-reggae.
• This was used in the movies Ezra (2023) and Save Me (2007).