Songfacts®:

• This is the title track of the second studio album from New York indie band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The record was recorded in the fall of 2010, produced by Flood and mixed by Alan Moulder.
• In an interview with Spinner, vocalist/guitarist Kip Berman discussed the song's meaning: "It's about trying to find your place. We moved away from that very narrative-based, written-from-memory, moral-of-the-story reflective indie-pop songwriting and tried to capture something that is immediate, emotional and can be understood without clear explanation. Sometimes that means different things each time I hear it or think about it - and certainly different things to different people. The true meaning of things is when people hear it, the meaning they see in it - not really what the intention of the person writing it was. I'd hate to have Thom Yorke show up at my house and explain to me what each track on The Bends was really about."