Songfacts®:

• Built on a ukulele riff, this whimsical track finds Half Moon Run singer Devon Portielje standing strong in his decisions and refusing to let someone else influence his choices. "Now you wanna switch the song," he sings. "Well, we don't have to get along."
• Although the song debuted on the Canadian rock band's 2023 album, Salt, its journey started more than a decade earlier when Portielje packed a ukulele on a trip to Thailand simply because it was easier to tote than a guitar. When he brought home the riff, the rest of the band loved it, but it turned sour in the studio.
  
  Portielje told the Songfacts Podcast in 2023: "At some point in 2013 the band was in Australia and we went to a studio, and we tracked it and we brought horn players in. And then it just sucked. Something about it just sucked. Then we went to our own studio and we went through it many, many times - many variations, arrangement changes like you wouldn't believe, just trying...'Oh, what if this is four bars longer? What if this is four bars shorter?'"
  
  For years, the band kept "Alco" buried in their song graveyard - the bottom corner of their double whiteboard - and occasionally dug it up for another try. Finally, when Salt producer Connor Seidel showed interest in the track, they resurrected it in earnest and transformed it into something new. Once they had the arrangement done, reworking the original lyrics was the biggest challenge.
  
  Portielje told Songfacts: "It was almost 100% gibberish, which is also a really hard mountain to climb when you have all of the song done, all of the syllabic phrasings on all of the melodies done, but none of the words done. You're setting yourself up for a very challenging thing to fit words into syllables that you've already decided the length of and the sound of."
• After their fourth member, Isaac Symonds, left the band in 2020, Half Moon Run was left with their founding trio: Portielje, Conner Molander, and Dylan Phillips. While putting together their next album, the threesome found themselves mining through old ideas with a new perspective.
  
  "This record represents a broad, sweeping scope of output from different eras of this band," Molander explained. "While making this record, it felt as if we were boiling down a huge cauldron of musical ideas, trying to reduce it to something elemental. What we were left with was Salt."