Chairlift Annotated Songs From Moth On Genius

The duo discussed lyrics and sources of inspiration.

February 09, 2016

Still can't believe MOTH is finally out. Can't wait to see you all on tour this year!

A photo posted by CHAIRLIFT (@chairlifted) on

Chairlift released Moth last month, and the duo connected with Genius this week to contextualize some of the songs from the record. "Ch-Ching" apparently nods to The Time's "773-9311," Kate Bush's album The Dreaming," and the movie Topkapi, while the title track pays homage to Heart's "Magic Man."

ADVERTISEMENT

Interestingly, "Moth To The Flame" was written in 2012 and mostly forgotten about. "I was starting to use Ableton Live and wanted to learn how to make house music," Caroline Polacheck explains. "So I offhandedly wrote this as a sort of dummy song to test drum and synth sounds out with, and then completely forgot about it. It wasn’t until our record was pretty much ready to be mixed when I was cleaning out my computer and I found it and I thought oh, this is kind of fun. It had a very different, more sprawling dance structure: a long instrumental in the middle, then back to the chorus and another instrumental. I brought it in and played it for Patrick and for the engineer, who we made a lot of this record with. And Patrick was sort of taking it in like, all right, okay, and our engineer, who is a really emotional guy was just bouncing off the walls and was like, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, we have to do this! We have to do this!’ So we retracked the vocal and sent it to Robin Hannibal, who had done some co-production on 'Ch-Ching,' and he completely restructured it and sent us back what ended up being the final structure of the song."

Read the rest of the group's annotations here.

ADVERTISEMENT
Chairlift Annotated Songs From Moth On Genius