"Chicago" actually has the distinction of being the oldest song on the album, as well as the one with the most complex backstory. It began life as the 11th version of a melody that I was trying to write over a track that never made it onto our last album KABOOM! I had been banging my head against the proverbial wall with this track for almost a year at that point (I even did a music business case study about the track itself: see the video here), and finally one day I was riding the train downtown and the melody and lyrics all came to me in a rush, a song about losing yourself in the city and finding yourself in the idea of losing yourself.

I loved that version of the song, which ended up being the 11th out of 18, and the version that was my personal favorite, but that track never made it onto the album, and actually it wasn't even in consideration for The Near Future either during the first recording sessions. However, after our explosive band blowup which led to scrapping the entire first set of sessions, we spent months in our practice space mulling over what we really wanted on the album. One day, Chad (the drummer) out of the blue was like, "what about Chicago?" and we all laughed. We had such weird associations with the song, and it was attached in our heads to the old track, but we decided we'd just play through it once the way we'd want to play it instead of thinking of the original track in our heads, and by the end of that play through we all looked at each other an agreed it had to be on the album.

I'm so happy it ended up on there. It's a song about home, about losing yourself and finding yourself, and about being out on a quest but also knowing that you've got someplace, something, someone in your heart to come home too, that's always out there with you in a way.