Little Things


"High school sucked for us and we were reminiscing about it and started spitting out lyrics about our what happened to us in high school and our experiences. The song is an autobiographical tale about high school years." - Benji


"After we wrote the song and I really looked at it, I was, like, 'Whoa. This all sounds pretty bad.' The part about my mom, the part about my dad... that's where it's really sensitive because it's not me anymore, it's someone else." - Joel



Motivation Proclamation


"Motivation Proclamation is about not feeling motivated and feeling bad about yourself... and wanting someone to come and pick you up. Benji and I wrote it together." - Joel


"It's great especially because it is a song about being down. We were at a point before we were signed so we were at our lowest point; we had nowhere to live, we had no money and we just wrote that song. It's kinda weird now because it is a pretty happy sort of song but you wouldn’t know we were at a breaking point when we wrote it." - Joel



Festival Song


"Festival song is ah, basically not wanting to subscribe to like the status quo, you know the normal life that everyone has, you know when you're growing up everyone wants you to do a certain thing, they want you to live a certain way, and kids like us we didn't have a lot of the opportunities that other people had but we still were expected to do that. We wrote this song saying forget about it and we're gonna do our own thing, and that's what festival song is." - Joel


"I grew up coming to the HFStival. I wrote this song about being there, how we wanted to quit our jobs to be in a band. We have all our friends, the fans and the radio support right here." - Joel



Change


"I wrote a song, Change, on our album for a girl. It's the classic story of loving someone who doesn't love you back." - Joel



Thank You, Mom


"We thought it was an appropriate way to end our first record, my mom has done a lot for our band. Lit offered us a bunch of shows on their tour, and we had no way to go because we had nothing to drive. My mom gave us her minivan, the only thing she owned, and she walked to work so we could go on tour. There's nothing I could do to repay my mom. She's heard the songs and she loves our music. That's another reason that there's no cursing on our record: because of mom." - Benji



Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous


"We've read articles in Rolling Stone where artists are just complaining about their lives. When we were young and coming up with this band, we would have done anything to make it. If we got an article in the magazine, we'd feel lucky to be there. That's why we wrote that." - Benji


"That song was really inspired by L.A., where we made the record. How cheesy we thought L.A. was, and how ridiculous we thought a lot of the celebrities are. It really is amazing how some of those people are just not in the real world." - Billy


"It's our take on the celeb world. We're surrounded by people whose lives we don't get. We're making fun of them in this song." - Joel



Girls and Boys


"It's a commentary on superficiality between girls and boys, women and men. 'Girls don't like boys, they like cars and money/ Boys will laugh at girls when they're not funny.' That says it all. That's the chorus. We see that a lot." - Benji



My Bloody Valentine


"The song is more of a poem. It's a story about a love triangle, but it's got a real Edgar Allan Poe vibe to it. Basically there's a guy that knows a girl and wants to be with her so he kills her boyfriend. It's definitely different than anything we've ever done and that's one reason we like it so much. It's something we couldn't have written four years ago." - Benji



Riot Girl


"That's definitely describing my dream girl, my punk rock girl. But good punk rock girls are hard to find. They're always mean." - Benji



Emotionless


"I feel like my dad affected my life in a bad way for long enough when I was younger, and I’m not gonna let him do it anymore. I’m not gonna carry that burden of being hateful and angry. So 'Emotionless' is a song of forgiveness. I'll forgive him for my sake: I won’t let those feelings about him affect the way I treat other people or the way I live my life." - Benji