Naomi McPherson

I don't know this song.

Does anybody know this?

You do, but you don't know, like... I can ride my bike with no handlebars.

Oh, yes.

I was a kid when that song got super popular, I think.

I don't know exactly when it was.

But, like, I just remember being like, this was such a cool experience of, like, you're kind of drawn into the song by, like, the catchiness of it and the imagery that he's presenting.

And then it kind of feels like the, like, wool is pulled off of your eyes where it's, like, something in the beginning that feels quite innocuous, like, is revealed to be, like,

evil and i was like i want to try to do that with big stick but it's also like last thing i'll say about it is like this is one of the times where like we write something and then like when we wrote i know a place that was like we wrote it like six months before the pulse shooting in orlando so

I wrote imagining like a space of laying down your weapons, but I was like, this is not, I wasn't thinking like this is a literal thing.

And it was like really heartbreaking that that became the case.

And then it also was really humbling that like our community used that song as, you know, like an anthem to kind of heal in that time.

Yeah.

And with Big Stick, I will say that, like, I wrote that line about if you have a problem with starving kids in Palestine, then you'll end up in jail and, like, we'll send you to Louisiana.

I wrote that about Mahmoud Khalil.

But I didn't put anything in the song about being murdered by the state because I was like, well, we're not there yet.

And then between writing the song and the song coming out, we had two people be murdered in Minneapolis by the state for speaking up against the ICE raid.

So it was kind of like this thing of like...

It really is this bad at this point.

The song feels really escalatory, but this is where we are.