This week on “Liner Notes,” we invited Portland’s Crosstide to tell us more about their track “(I Feel) Like a Polar Bear.” The upbeat track warmed over the hearts of OurStage’s Indie Pop faithful garnering a lot of attention and a place in the Top 10 this past September. Band frontman Bret Vogel took the time to fill us in about the tune.

I was having a hard time writing a straight forward feel good lyric for this song. I have been thinking a lot about how my generation (my self included) seems to spends a lot of time being rather public about their private lives. Blogging or writing songs, whatever. And here we are in the midst of an environmental crisis, at least 2 wars, and a million other social injustices. This song was basically me being sarcastic about the whole thing. I’m trying to contrast global warming with my own self absorption and general miserableness.

Musically, “(I Feel) Like a Polar Bear is one of three songs on Walls of Home that Bryan Free and I wrote together. The music was basically all done in a matter of minutes. We had been talking about how we thought it was cool when bands used classic rhythms from the 50’s in modern music. He was playing the organ and I was playing the bass parts on an acoustic guitar and it just fell together. The song has a few parts in it that are embarrassingly playful, and it took awhile to sell the rest of the group on them, but we both felt that it was those parts that made the song work. Rian (our guitar player and engineer) did a great job of capturing the whole thing on the record. I especially like all the percussion and clapping that he had us do.