Songfacts®:

• David Bowie probably isn't the first person you think of when you listen to Villages, a Canadian folk-rock band with Celtic leanings, but his words of wisdom made an impact on singer Matt Ellis. When he was struggling with Dark Island's closing track, "Rocks In The Field," he remembered the Thin White Duke's philosophy on taking creative risks.
  
  "There's a Bowie line where he was like, if you're in your comfort zone, you're not doing anything that's really unique or riveting," Ellis told the Songfacts podcast. "So I've always taken that to heart."
  
  Here's the full Bowie quote he's likely referencing: "If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting."
• Matt explained how the song evolved from its demo stages: "When we originally demoed it, it had kind of a Waterboys, shanty, shuffley vibe. The version we recorded is less of a foot-stomping, uptempo song. It took me a while to fully understand it, and now it's a song that I adore."
• Villages wanted to take listeners on a sonic trip to Cape Breton Island - their homeland in Nova Scotia - on Dark Island, so they enlisted jazz composer Joshua Van Tassel (Great Lake Swimmers, Fortunate Ones) to produce the album.
  
  "He's a great soundscapist," Matt Ellis explained. "We find Cape Breton is otherworldly, and we wanted to match that sonically, and he was able to do it and then some… A great approach that he took was a live, off-the-floor recording, with minimal takes. He would consistently say, 'I'm into capturing moments.'"
• Van Tassel's approach helped Ellis let go of his perfectionist tendencies and embrace the moment. "You can really overkill a tune with perfectionism sometimes," he explained. "On an individual level, say vocally, I could just cut a lot of things and be like, 'Let's get the best vocal of this, and let's record it 10 times and get the best phrase there.' But that's not the moment, and it took me this particular record to see that and let that go and be like, 'This was us playing the tune together and this is what we sound like.'"
• Dark Island is Villages' second full-length album, following their 2019 self-titled debut.