Sugarcane

Album: Bitter Rivals (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Guitarist Derek Miller told NME this is a personal song. He explained: "The first lyric is, 'So so sleeping on the ground tonight. I couldn't breath so I had to move east,' I was born in Pahokee, Florida which is in south Florida in the middle of the state. And I was raised in Belglade where my dad was a sugarcane farmer. You have to burn the fields as part of the harvest, to shuck the cane. And it literally rains ashes from the sky. It sounds like a very nice, apocalyptic image. It's not poetic, it's insane. It's crazy, it's surreal. And I remember that at the age of four, and I had terrible asthma so I couldn't breath. That's why we ended up moving east to Jupiter, to the Ocean. The doctor said, 'this kid needs clean air' and I've since grown out of it. It's a really personal song."

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