The guys might have intended to get girls swooning and moving on the dance floor to a more light-hearted track, but the song is more girl-centric than they may realize. Polachek wrote the song after an intense two months of touring in Europe and the U.S. with Chairlift, the aftermath of which found her sick and dealing with a myriad of rather personal issues. “The song ended up being about being in a state of such intense apathy that you start to lose touch with your personal relationship and kind of sink into a hole of completely relaxed, kind of druggy apathy. In one sense the song was actually written about taking birth control pills and in another sense it was written about allowing yourself to kind of let some of your ethics and morals go just for the sake of survival,” says Polachek.
Wait, birth control pills? Fascinated by the secretive process surrounding taking morning-after pills such as Plan B, Polachek explores the power behind the control of pregnancy for women in the midst of a life that is “out-of-control and chaotic and irresponsible,” and the feeling of walking around with the pill in question in one’s pocket, and “leading the life that makes you have to take it in the first place.”
An interesting and thoughtful exploration for sure, the topic proved a little risqué for some of the higher-ups. “The first set of lyrics that I wrote for the song actually got rejected by the label because they were too explicit…So I just changed it so that all the meaning is still there but it’s a little more veiled and more abstract, people can interpret it in different ways if they want to this way,” says Polachek.
So, what does “Big Bills” mean then? For the songstress the phrase “is about two things. [It's] about reaping the benefits of stuff that has already happened, like getting paid, and it’s also about the big bills that you have to pay for letting things slip. It’s kind of a song about irresponsibility.”
Along with the creation of the song for the label, GLS also provided the opportunity for the artists to shoot a video, brilliantly captured by director Keven McAlester. Shot in a warehouse space in Brooklyn on a frigid day with temperatures 20 degrees below zero and no heating, the video is inspired by famous Danish contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson. The artist is known for his installation pieces, using mirrors and light to create dynamic spaces, often incorporating prisms and projections. McAlester cites the simple and mathematical elements of Eliasson’s compositions as influences for the clean, minimal look of the video. Luckily for the boys, they got to bundle up for their appearances in the clip, while Polachek toughed it out in a scanty (but adorable!) shift dress: “I was freezing…between every shot, they were like ‘Quick! Get her a jacket! Get her a jacket!’ It was like nothing I’d ever experienced.”
With “Albums of the Year” lists waning on the side of irrelevance in comparison to “Singles of the Year,” the Flosstradamus x Caroline Polachek collaboration might just rank up there with the year’s strongest tracks come December. The GLS model is one that works, showcasing artists in a context where quality rather than quantity matters. In regard to the (seemingly imminent) death of the album format as we know it, Polachek remarks, “At this point it takes an almost addictive single to make people actually go out and buy a record…it’s an entry-point into the record. So if an album gets Album of the Year, that means there must be one hell of a single on it.”
“Big Bills” might just be that addictive single in the case of Flosstradamus—and good thing, since this original composition has prompted the group to explore music production on a whole new level. Says Young, “People were kind of surprised when they heard ‘Big Bills’ but in actuality, aside from the remixes we have out, people don’t know what a Flosstradamus song sounds like. That was one of the coolest parts about this project and starting to work on this production—we’re starting to find our own sound outside the remix realm. Because we haven’t had many original releases, we have a lot of space to kind of work around and be creative, and really develop our sound—something we can really put our stamp on. It’s been an awesome process.”
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