Death Will Bring Change

When Parquet Courts co-frontman Austin Brown was 20-years-old, he lost his 16-year-old sister in a school bus accident. This song is about how the tragic event changed him. He explained to The Independent: "It's not about the death so much as how it affects – how it changes your personality; how it changes your life. Death is tragic and then the people who are left to deal with it, with grief, who are still around, have to deal with the emotional effect – that's what the song is about."

The song features a children's choir recorded at a rock music school on the Upper East Side. Their voices were added after the rest of the song had been completed. So why did Brown see the need to include the innocent-sounding children singing the bleak lyrics? He explained to Billboard: "The song is about the death of a child. I thought having the children sing the coda has this dark sensibility to it."

Recording the children's voices was quite a nightmare for Brown. He explained: "The children weren't with us in Texas when we were [there recording]. I had to go to the School of Rock in the Upper East Side at 9 a.m. and face these precocious 8-12-year-olds. That was pretty scary. I had a really late night before, I had like two hours of sleep and I come in there and they're like, 'alright, whatever you want us to do.' I've never been around that many children, especially in a position of being in charge of anything. I got a good 20 minutes out of them. We got like four takes, maybe, and after that I was like, 'that's a good starting place, okay let's try it a few different ways.' And they all looked at me like, 'are you serious? We're done.' I couldn't explain to them and be like, I'm gonna take what you did and go work on it for 8 hours. They just did 20 minutes and they thought they were in there for days. There were a couple parents in there who were really excited, but the kids didn't seem to really understand what was going on. For them, it was just another cool thing they were doing or something their parents made them go do. A couple of them were having fun. I'm just not really used to being around kids. I wasn't prepared to be charismatic. They didn't seem very impressed with me at all. That was a surprise. It was really difficult. I'm really glad that I went through with it but it was very scary. You should never co-star with animals or children and now I understand why."