"Erasers" is actually a really good example of how States songs come together, because sometimes it literally takes years for a song to develop from an idea to a finished song. "Erasers" actually developed from a little bridge in a song I wrote four years ago as a Christmas present for my girlfriend. That song was just acoustic guitars and some keyboards and words taken from a Billy Collins poem called "Litany." I really liked that song, but I only spent three or four hours writing it, so really it was kind of a stream-of-conscious collection of ideas that ended in this weird cacophony of keyboard noise. In short, good ideas, no structure.

Fast-forward three years to the summer of 2008, when the band was putting together the material that we were going to record in Nashville that winter with our producer Chris Grainger. One day, Joe and I were in the practice room fooling around. I think Pete was stuck in traffic on his way to rehearsal. I'd been listening to some old songs of mine trying to find ideas, and I pulled out the guitar figure that is now the introduction to the song. Joe really liked it right off the bat, and we spent about a half hour working through the rhythm and the full band stops that happen throughout the song. By the time Pete showed up, we had a basic structure going. Pete knew exactly what he wanted to do almost immediately, and by the time we left that day we had most of the song figured out.

In June of 2008, we took a trip to Nashville to do some pre-production for the record with Grainger. "Erasers" was one of the songs we had decided to work on, and after playing through it once, Chris commented that he really wanted to hear a breakdown. We experimented with a few ideas and ended up with the middle structure of the song as it exists now -- "and your eyes will be like ours / tired and comely..." to the part where the band drops out and it's just me singing "everything she's ever thought, every feeling in her heart, all she's known is sadness, all your heart is empty pouring out." The afternoon where the band and Grainger figured that out was a big moment for us as a band, the kind of "Ah-hah" feeling you get when you finally figure out how to do something really hard. For us, it was figuring out how we were going to approach the rest of the writing for the record, and figuring out how to approach the inevitable editing process that comes towards the end of a few months of writing, when you have dozens of ideas and they all have to become songs, somehow.

I hardly ever write the lyrics to songs before they're written. In fact, most of the songs on the EP didn't have real words until we were down in Nashville most of the way through recording. I'm not sure why it works this way for me, but States songs have almost always worked that way. In the case of "Erasers," I had some words that I really liked that were from the original version of the song, when it was called "Litany." Most of these made it into the first verse (for instance, "what if you forgot all there was to know, buried your thoughts in the falling snow?"). The band has always written political songs, but with this record we felt like we wanted to experiment with what it meant to write a political song, so we tried to be more imaginative in our approach. "Erasers" is modeled, in part, after George Orwell's 1984 and Michel Gondry's amazing film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in the sense that it's about a society not too different from ours in which you can choose to erase yourself entirely and start over again, with a mind as pure as snow. But there are also sinister overtones, along the lines of a Big Brother -- "and if your blood should refuse to flow, and if your thoughts should begin to slow, we will be there, we will be there, and you'll be blameless, you will be erased." For me, the song is about the danger of ideologies, whether it be a political party, or a religion, or whatever, that threaten to swallow you whole, to replace who YOU are with some prefabricated notion of who THEY want you to be.

We've been playing the song on tour for a few months now, and it's getting a really positive response. Frankly, it might be one of the better songs we've ever written. I think people really respond to the big changes in dynamics that happen between the verses and the choruses, and the fact that the lyrics seem really personal even while they're vaguely creepy. Everyone likes to be creeped out a little bit, right?

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album - right here!

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