Songfacts®:

• Nick Waterhouse calls this rock-and-roll conclusion to his album The Fooler a "turnover song" because it makes you want to listen to the whole album all over again with a different perspective. The story follows a pair of lovers who struggle to connect in the midst of changes in their inner and outer world, but the closing track isn't really about them. Or is it?
  
  "'Unreal' was a tune that really is the outside world completely and it has nothing to do in a way with the characters," Waterhouse told Songfacts in 2023, "but it has everything to do with the characters because it shows you what the external world has to offer to the two people living within the story. It also will reveal to you how special and significant the relationship is between those two people because it's going on in the midst of, Mark [Neill, producer] will call it, Machiavellian horror."
• Waterhouse, who got the idea for the album - and its title track - on a visit to San Francisco during the pandemic, also said the tune tells the story of California. "The last verse is about westward expansion," he explained. "The ruse of the culture, the system we live in, the economy we live in, the environment we live in, being pushed further and further west. In the hope of this fantasy, empty way of being. And that this couple, these two people that are relating to each other in these other songs, are their own world contained almost as a resistance, a cell within that world."
• After releasing his previous album, the lush jazz-pop collection Promenade Blue, Waterhouse made some big changes in his personal life, including ending a long-term relationship and leaving his California home for France, which affected his professional life in unexpected ways. The Fooler marks a dramatic shift in his sound, adding a psychedelic edge to his retro R&B style as recalls a version of San Francisco he left behind.
  
  "The pendulum swung hard in the other direction," he noted in a press release. "It was not intentional. It really shook me how much of a punctuation Promenade Blue actually felt like. I was shutting a door with that, I did everything I could with that world. Now, we're into this other sonic world."