Lemonworld

This much laboured-over bittersweet moodpiece nearly didn't make it onto High Violet. It evolved from a sparse recording into a much larger, multi-layered song. Still not happy, the band cast it aside only for it to salvaged at the insistence of frontman Matt Berninger. The final version on the record is just about the same as the original demo.

Berninger explained what a Lemonworld is to The Quietus: "A Lemonworld is an invented, sexy, weird place where you can escape from New York. I had some image of it being a big beautiful, maybe semi-decrepit house. You know the documentary Grey Gardens? It's set in a house out in the Hamptons, it's about this crazy mother and daughter who live there in their own little world. It's also very depressing and odd and beautiful. Anyways, I had this sense of a Lemonworld as a place where these two sexy sisters who wear bathing suits all the time and drink a lot, y'know, 'put flowers in my mouth and we can say we invented a summer lovin' torture party' – that's awesome! That's sexy, weird, and fun. My wife and her sister are very close in age, they're both hilarious and sexy and brilliant, so I think I was channeling them a little bit. It's a fun world."