Walking Paranoia

In our interview with Mutemath drummer, Darren King, it was revealed this song is about the paranoia which can emerge from a religious upbringing: "That song is all about how we were raised. You're raised in this scene where there's a lot of talk of demons and you just talk of the Rapture, and as a kid, when a little airplane would fly overhead and you'd hear the sound, I would literally run and go check to see if my mom was still there, because I wanted to make sure that that sonic boom wasn't the Rapture. And if it was, I knew my mom would be gone for sure, because she was the best person I knew. So if Mom got raptured, and I'm still around, then I'm in trouble. So it was this paranoia. Or if you look at a dirty magazine for the first time when you're 11 or 12, and then for the rest of that year you wonder if you're going to go to hell – that's a true story of mine – and then toil over that. And then I went back to the gas station and I tried to apologize to the gas station attention for looking at the dirty magazine, and it was a completely different person that owned the place, they didn't have dirty magazines anymore. Weird stuff like that."

"Walking Paranoia" features on Odd Soul, Mutemath's third album. King told us the entire record carries this theme of religious upbringing and social awkwardness: "Well, to me, it represents the idea that I'm strange. I mean, I remember growing up as a kid thinking that to be me, to be a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant teen, growing up in Missouri, was sort of the absence of culture. I thought that I was raised with a blank canvas regarding culture and that I had nothing in that regard. And then as I get older, I do start to see it differently. And I bear both this pride and also embarrassment for who I am culturally and religiously. And I feel strange. I feel like a weird person."