Songfacts®:

• The opening track of Fading Frontier finds Deerhunter exploring ideas of existential dread and identity in the indie rock world. Asked by the New York Observer what he was thinking when he wrote the line, "my friends dad got bored, changed his sex and had no more," frontman Bradford Cox replied: "It's a serious re-evaluation of identity; maybe I just had some stuff on my mind that crept out."
  
  "I have a friend whose dad came out, and announced, 'I'm gay and I'm leaving the family to go live with my boyfriend.' I'm not saying what I think about it—I'm saying I considered both the perspective of the father, reaching for some ultimate truth and honesty and the feeling of the faithful family who perhaps value…you could say, well what about the value of other people's feelings over your honesty?"
• As for the album title, Cox told NME it refers to the changing nature of the modern music industry. "Unless you're willing to be 100 per cent independent - which I would encourage - then I would avoid any interaction with the music industry," he said. "I feel very outside of the whole thing now. When I was in high school, I was really interested in Baudrillard, but it's only now that I'm older do I understand a lot of what he was talking about - they're observations from outside a collapsing situation, and that's what the industry is like now."
  
  "For me, 1959 was the summit of the mountain - you had Jackson Pollock, John Coltrane, the cinematic new wave and rock'n'roll. Everything after that became a roller coaster ride to the bottom, which is where we are now. It's become very vacuous, and we're all part of this gradual sucking-down. It's like the inside of a coffin!"