My Little Girl

Johnson told Billboard magazine that he sometimes gets concerned about being too personal in his songwriting. He therefore occasionally takes lines out of songs or rewrites them to disguise their meaning. This song, for example, is an ode to his infant daughter, but he doesn't mention her by name. "At listening parties it seems like all the dads that have daughters come up to me when they hear that song and they say, 'Aw, man, I was really feeling that,'" Johnson said. "I realized that although it feels personal to me when I'm writing it and you can tell I'm singing from a place where I'm really feeling those emotions, they're not thinking about my little girl, they're thinking about their own. And so it becomes very impersonal in that way."

Johnson told Rolling Stone how his baby daughter encouraged him to write in a more upbeat manner for To the Sea compared with his previous release. He explained: "She loves to sing. Anytime I start to play piano or guitar she starts to do this little noise and she smiles a lot. So when you have that kind of energy around it's a lot easier to write positive songs, you know? The last album I was definitely losing a couple of people who were really close to me and so it was hard to really write anything except songs that were reflecting back on someone's life. And then with this new little baby in the world - it was definitely more the celebration of life."