Songfacts®:

• The resilient lyrics of the album Lift a Sail's title track reflect the inspiring determination of Yellowcard frontman Ryan Key's wife at the time, Russian snowboarder Alyona Alekhina, who suffered a spinal injury that left her paralyzed from the waist down (the couple have since divorced). It also touches on difficulties the band had been through, such as drummer Longineu W. "LP" Parsons III departure in March 2014. "It's the one song that really encompasses this whole experience," Key declared to The Daily Telegraph. "It's saying, we're ready for anything now."
• Ryan Key told USA Today about the album title: "Typically when you go into titling a record, you go through this process of, 'is this going to be a title that stands on its own and it kind of captures the vibe of a record and what the record means?' Or, 'is it going to be a title track' - one of the songs is going to be the name of the record. In this case I feel like 'Lift a Sail' was chosen because it's sort of like a mission statement for the record. The record is very much about, lyrically, at least, about just overcoming and moving forward and moving past something in your life. I've been through a personal experience over the last year and a half that's been pretty traumatizing and pretty intense and needed to write about it and ended up writing a lot about it for the record. So, the song 'Lift a Sail,' is just about, as the lyrics said, just kind of being ready for whatever's going to come next in your life, and I think that whole idea really goes throughout the record. And I also think the words, when you see them and hear them - when you say them - they just sort of invoke a positive feeling. And I think I really enjoy that. And that's definitely what we wanted to give off with that record, so that's how we ended up on that."
• Lead guitarist Ryan Mendez told the music blog Allston Pudding how the band's musical approach changed on the album: "We made the music consciously heavy, we tuned lower. I actually really like heavier music, I'm really into metal. And some of that found its way into this record. As a band as a whole, we're all actually big fans of Coldplay, and we pulled some influence from the atmospheric synth they use on this album as well. All of Coldplay's songs sound like they should be played in an arena; they're like these big, anthemic tunes, and we tried to capture the vibe of that. And the fact that you noticed that means it worked!"
• Mendez also explained how the band stayed true to their signature sound, especially on this track: "We were trying to make something that sound bigger and more expansive. This sound is newer and more exploratory, but it still has some of the old vibes. It still has the melodic singing, and the violin in it. That's like our signature, the violin - we're always going to have that. But you have these bands that have been around for a long time, and they just keep making the same album over and over again, and we didn't want to be that.