About Forever Cul-de-sac:

This song starts as a tribute to the suburban neighborhood which was my whole world for the first nine years of my life. I found out after we recorded this song that cul-de-sac is a French word and it means, literally, bottom of the bag. To me, it always meant a dead-end street that went around and around. I used to bike through those cul-de-sac neighborhoods with my friends, inventing reasons to explore. But no matter how far we went, we could never pedal our way out. So curious. So determined. And so unaware of what we couldn’t see.

Today I still find myself in places I can’t see out of; forever pushing forward, but only ever going around in circles. It feels like movement. It feels like progress. It feels like change. But when you look closely, you realize you’re in the same places but with different names and faces. It happens to Me. It happens to You. And those people out there who seem so unaffected? They experience it too. We are all here together, going around and around, struggling to break free. – Tim Perry

This song is sort of like an onion in reverse, where nothing musically really changes but layer after layer is added to what adds up to a giant ball of musical ideas. The structure and evolution of the song are really deliberate in terms of how they circle around and around this simple idea, like a kid daydreaming in their cloistered little neighborhood or an ambitious adult caught in their own happy world which nourishes and suffocates them at the same time. – Rob Oberdorfer