Songfacts®:

• Frontwoman Emily Haines named this Synthetica track after a poem by her late poet father Paul Haines, and she described it to Spinner as the "heart of the record." "Thought I made a stand, only made a scene." Haines ruefully sings.
• Haines turns the focus back on the music itself, when she sings: "Have I ever really helped. Anybody but myself. To believe in the power of songs? To believe in the power of girls?" She explained to UK newspaper The Guardian that this represents several strands of thought coming together, not just about music, but about young women and their relationship to the world: "There's a whole generation of girls who are so feminist that pole-dancing is their way of expressing it. It's a fu--ing joke. It's brilliant for sexist guys," she said.
• Another thread running through the song sees Haines pining for what she sees as a lost age of musical unity. "Thousands of people gathered around listening to Bob Dylan songs, Hendrix playing 'All Along The Watchtower,' that level of communication happening on a mass cultural scale," she told The Guardian. I was feeling like, 'Ah, man, I haven't done that.'"