Ra Ra Riot Return With First New Song in Five Years: Listen

Rostam and I have been longtime collaborators and have gotten to work on all kinds of different projects together over the years. It’s always something fun and exciting and new. When we got into his studio recently, we found we’d both been getting into fingerpicking—some folk stuff, like Fairport Convention, Joni Mitchell, Anne Briggs, Judy Sill, that kind of stuff. And so we just went from there. It started with a riff I had, super rough, with a sort of nebulous story, and he helped simplify the fingerpicking pattern and start molding it into more of a specific story and vibe. Rostam added some organ—Hammond B3—and some mandolin, and Joey, his assistant, who’s studied Latin percussion, really added a lot of movement to it. Over the course of two trips to L.A., we wrote, re-wrote, and recorded the song almost in real time, and I think it’s something really new for us. To me, the song’s about the power of imagining a different world—not necessarily in a fantastic or escapist way, but in an empowering way. About manifesting these deeply held wants and desires. Having these powerful dream visions and trying to capture that moment before you fall deeply into dreaming. Rostam and I love working on songs that can read as both happy and sad at the same time and using that tension to amplify and understand the depth of these feelings and visions.