Songfacts®:

• The lead single from The Far Field, "Ran" finds Samuel T Herring singing about life on the road, and missing loved ones.
  
  On these roads
  Out of love, so it goes
  How it feels when we fall, when we fold
  How we lose control on these roads
  
  Herring discussed the song's meaning in a video: "It's about all the trials and tribulation that happen from us being out on the road, the things that we miss back home and also the things we go towards—and all those feelings. So I think it pretty much encapsulates a lot of the things that we've written about over time, but it's just the newest understanding of that in our lives."
• Herring told Radio.com how a decade of touring led to this song:
  
  "We kind of got off the road at the end of 2015 on our two-year album cycle for our last record, Singles, which came out around this time in 2014, three years ago. We took maybe a month off, and we started the writing sessions for the next record in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We went down and rented a house in Buxton, North Carolina, in the southern part of the Outer Banks. We're all from, or grew up in, North Carolina, so that place is very important to us.
  
  But it was a way for us to kind of get away and reconvene as friends and musical partners, but get away from everything and just sit down and write. So we rented this house and just set up all our gear in the living room and started making sounds, and 'Ran' came out of… the music came out of that session. And it was one of the first songs; it was written for the album. But I think, in a way, it encapsulates a lot of the themes that come out of the record, which aren't necessarily new to us because we've spent most of the last nine and a half, ten years on the road as a touring band."
• The Albert Berney-directed video shows Herring bolt from a rehearsal space. We follow him bounding over Baltimore's Howard Street Bridge and into the open country. The singer admitted to Rolling Stone. "Me and William [Cashion] came up with the concept of the video and the day we shot it, I was like, 'Oh shoot, now I have to go run' – I haven't run in like, eight years!" (laughs) "After that, I was hobbled over."
• The Far Field is Future Island's fifth studio album. Both this record and the band's third studio album, In Evening Air are titled after poems in Theodore Roethke 1964 collection The Far Field.