Matt Berninger and his wife Carin Besser have one daughter, Isla, who was born in 2009. This song finds him singing of his parental anxieties. I walk into walls and I lay awake I don't want to give it to my daughter Uncut magazine commented to Berninger that voicing his worries about his daughter in song may seem uncomfortably honest. "Why put something out in the world that isn't going to be useful to you or isn't going to help you?" he argued. "I'm not going to lift up a rock unless I know there's something hiding underneath it. So if a song doesn't have a lizard underneath it - or some bug that has to be telling me something - I won't even spend any time on it. I don't think I ever wrote the same after my daughter was born. I think your entire brain chemistry, changes. So I think about my kid, and her future, every time I write anything."
Berninger has written lyrics before about his fears concerning his fatherly responsibilities. The National's 2010 track "Afraid of Everyone," for instance, concerns his anxiety about becoming a dad.
"Serpentine Prison" is titled after a sewer pipe of that name that feeds into the ocean near LAX. Berninger wrote this song in December 2018, about a week after completing the recording of The National's I Am Easy to Find. "For a long time, I had been writing songs for movies and musicals and other projects where I needed to get inside someone else's head and convey another person's feelings," he explained. "I liked doing that, but I was ready to dig back into my own garbage and this was the first thing that came out."
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