Songfacts®:

• The Connells are a North Carolina-based rock band who became college-radio favorites after the release of their 1985 debut album, Darker Days, and found commercial success in Europe with the single "74-75" in the early '90s. In 2021, they released their ninth studio album, Steadman's Wake, which was also their first album in 20 years.
• Mike Connell, the band's songwriter/guitarist/vocalist, told Songfacts the meaning behind the album's closing track. He said, "'Helium' is about how we really only understand and have a sense of ourselves in relation to our relationship with others - and especially those with whom we are closest - and the feeling of coming unmoored and lost and adrift and 'Helium light' when that point of reference is lost after a relationship ends. So, that's where I was attempting to go with the lines, 'what we'd never known, turned to what we'd never know,' and 'what we'd never been, turned to what we'd never be…'
  
  It's also an attempt to convey the idea that a line of some sort has been crossed, with no going back - which was really all that an earlier song, '74-75' was all about."
• Steadman's Wake is also the band's first album to feature guitarist Mike Ayers and drummer Rob Ladd, although both musicians have been part of the band's performance lineup for several years.
• The album sessions were put on hold in 2018 so Rob Ladd could recover from a serious car accident. "Rob hit a dump truck head-on at 60 miles an hour," Mike Connell recalled on the band's website. "The first responders were surprised that he actually survived, but he’s a strong guy. That obviously put things on hold for a while, but we kept working on the record in fits and starts when we could. The impulse was to take one last crack at getting back in the studio and do one more proper record."