Impatience

This song is "sort of directed to a couple of people in general, but there's certainly one friend specifically," confesses We Are Scientists lead singer Keith Murray. "That's not necessarily a literal song, it's just like there were a series of instances in which this person demonstrated a total inability to behave anything like a moderately normal person in just relating to patience, and lost their cool several times over totally mundane issues. Like a grander frustration than was simply occurring at the time. So, of course, being the sort of person I am, I never actually had a conversation with this person about how annoying that was. Instead, I wrote a song about it and never actually discussed it with them." Still, he says he's pretty sure the person knows it's about them.

Typical of We Are Scientists, the video has nothing to do with the song itself, except for the band lip synching the words. This is because, according to Keith, "We're definitely not terribly interested in videos that are narrative portrayals of our songs." Budding filmmakers before forming the band, Keith and bass player Chris Cain like to poke fun at themselves by coming up with comical story lines for videos fashioned around darker songs. In this video, Keith is at first horrified at finding Chris turning into a werewolf, until he finds that the werewolf is not going to disembowel him. "As ridiculous as it is for a man who's had a video in which he's a cowboy wrangling Pomeranians ("Chick Lit") to say, that just seems kind of goofy stuff to do, but there's something just totally idiotic about story videos. Chris and I are very into film." In fact, they once tried accepting submissions for video concepts, but "they were so excruciatingly awful" that the idea was bagged for future projects. Keith explains their approach to making the videos as "little movies for which these songs score, not necessarily the narrative starting point. So I think we sort of like to take the opportunity of having a label give us a budget to shoot three minutes of film. We like to treat that as an opportunity to do something really weird and different and actually interesting, rather than just say, Well, let's make the video for this song the way any other crappy band who doesn't care about videos – not doesn't care, but just doesn't consider it an opportunity to make its own product of it. I think that we don't even really consider the videos that related to the songs." (read the full interview with Keith Murray)