Alaska by Pinegrove Lyrics

FAQ & Knowledge Song “Alaska”

• ℚ. What have the artists said about the song?

  Evan Stephens Hall via NPR’s All Songs Considered:

  “Alaska” is one of the early songs on 11:11, and I always like to sequence the albums very intentionally, so each song can advance the “plot,” a word I use in this case very loosely, basically the themes and repeating images on the album. So that’s part of the work “Alaska” is doing, part of its context.

  The song itself takes place on an airplane going diagonally across the country, a good vantage, I thought, for an overview. You see the rows of corn which from above look like corduroy, which in turn looks like the number 1 repeating, you see trees and cant help but be reminded of the near constant forest fires now across the west, you feel time behaving strangely in the liminal space of the cabin, which I guess here is a metaphor for how time has felt recently, and of course our pilot is asleep at the wheel. So with all of these things there’s a kind of absurdist repetition going on. ‘Haven’t we been here before? Why isn’t society learning from our mistakes?’ A lot of this album is about the climate crisis, and feeling angry at government inaction, and almost preemptively mourning these landscapes we’re seeing in the song—mourning our future.

  The future is a public good and it’s being stolen from us by people continuing to profit off of the destruction of our planet, but at the same time this song is kinda supposed to be catchy, accessible, sing-a-long-able, so when we sing it together we can remember what being part of a community feels like, because we need community right now. So it’s important for us to practice.