Like Exploding Stones

Kurt Vile wrote "Like Exploding Stones" during a spell of self-doubt. Stressed by his failures and riddled by anxiety, he ruminates over the pressure of life as a public performer. Vile sings: Pain ricochet in my brain like exploding stones Thoughts runnin' round in my cranium like pinball machine-a-mania Dreamin' of a time when everything rhymed and I was cool, calm and collected Some fans attributed the line about pain ricocheting in his brain like exploding stones to migraines. "I do get migraines, but at the time that I wrote it, it was just stress, weighing heavily down onto my psyche," Vile told the UK newspaper The Sun. "The song is an exorcism of that. By the end I see the light."

Feeling totally bummed out, Vile recorded the demo into his Zoom recorder with his acoustic guitar. "I imagined guitars feeding back, and the Moog synthesizer making noise, feedback massaging my cranium," he told Apple Music. "I had all those things in the demo. Yeah, that's the beauty: You can just exorcise demons."

Vile recorded the slow-burning, 7-minute song at his newly built home studio OKV Central, in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia. His backing band, The Violators, jammed over the tape he'd made that night, and longtime collaborator Rob Schnapf helped produce the track.