Songfacts®:

• Mitski takes a midnight walk on this song and accepts a deal, giving up her soul and all the burdens and baggage that come with it, wiping the slate clean.
  
  "In terms of what it means, this song is much more narrative than my other songs," she explained. "There's a beginning, middle and end and it's an actual fictional story. But in terms of what I intended for it, I think there are some of us, including myself, who just can't help but give ourselves away, and for some people it manifests in addiction, for some people it means we can't help but give our power up to another person who wants to control people, and for a lot of people it just means giving ourselves over to the market - having it tell us who we are and what we need to buy in order to be ourselves.
  
  I feel like it manifests in a lot of different ways and I think we can't help but do it because sometimes it's just so hard to carry the full weight of our existence and actually be fully accountable for it, so we give ourselves away or we hope to unburden ourselves by handing over the burden to another person or entity, and in the moment it maybe numbs the pain, it makes things easier, but I wanted to write a song about how in doing so maybe you also give up your capacity to feel full, real, unbound joy or just sing your full existence. Sing out who you are. You give up the good with the bad basically.
  
  That's what the song is about, hopefully, but at the end of the day it can mean whatever you want it to mean."
• Mitski got the idea for this song after reading a poem by Maria Mitchell, a pioneering astronomer who lived from 1818-1889. There's a line in the poem that goes:
  
  There's a deal to be learned in a midnight walk when you take it all alone
  
  but Mitski misread it as:
  
  There's a deal to be made on a midnight walk when you take it all alone
  
  She started thinking about what kind of deal you would make on such a walk, and wrote the lyric from there.
  
  "It's a poem about how when you go on a walk alone at night is when you can discover beautiful things about the world and about yourself that you probably wouldn't be able to discover if you were walking with somebody else or you were talking and your ears were full of talk instead of listening to the sounds of the night," she said. "So that's basically what the song is about."
• This is one of the more orchestral songs on Mitski's album The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. Drew Erickson conducted the orchestra and Patrick Hyland was her producer.