I remember having a conversation with Jackson around February 2011, early in the recording process, about whether there was any "truly acoustic dance music out there" -- "dance music" being narrowly defined as the rap, electronic, and pop music played in the clubs and house parties that surrounded us, that is.

---side note: Maybe we realized it at the time, maybe we didn't, but there's always been, of course, a wide variety of music danced to all across the world, and much of it using acoustic instruments. But our college-aged selves were more concerned with the Daft Punk, Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Tiesto and Rhianna (ok, at least these are the ones I'm willing to admit to. 10 years later I can recognize just how bad my taste in party music was, and probably still is) songs that soundtracked our late-night house parties and hangouts, and most of that music was devoid of anything resembling the acoustic folk instruments in the band.---

Anyhow, we eventually decided that the band LCD Soundsystem, one of our biggest influences at the time, were closest to incorporating acoustic instrumentation into electronic dance music, and I think that they, as well as the more local band, Givers, ended up influencing our approach to arranging and recording The March.

I think we were going for a half-bluegrass half-disco vibe, with Scott's superbly catchy mandolin solo allowing us to just dance around for the first minute of the song. And I'm not sure whose idea it was to throw in the alternate rhythm two thirds in, but Jackson's bass and Zach's drums lay down perhaps the best groove on the album for that third verse. It's the moment when we stop pretending it's a bluegrass tune and say "hey! here, dance with us!"


Lyrically, I think it's a bit of set design. The main character of the album is heading from the countryside to the city, and this was my best attempt to describe the society of "the city" he's about to find himself in. When writing it, I remember thinking of old war propaganda posters I'd seen in history class saying, "forward always, backwards never!" and thinking how well that described the rat race I was preparing myself for in school and later in college.

Our society likes to promises endless progress and I wanted to capture some of the relentless optimism it uses to sell itself to us. I've internalized quite a bit of that relentless optimism over the years, and I still think we can work it out as a society. But I also still think, more than ever, that turning an eye back on time and moving past a colonial, Christian-supremist, capitalist definition of progress might just be the only way "forwards" for all of us.


So, with all that in mind, I decided to remix The March into the electro-pop dance song it might have been all along. Techno is a genre I am still obsessed with for various reasons, but I remember being especially into it about 10 years ago and there was something nostalgic I just couldn't resist about fitting a techno beat to The March, a song all about dancing off society and its oft-misguided ideas of progress.

--Eric