“I wrote this one while listening to a lot of Mitski, and I think you can hear it, because her writing is so distinctive. If I'm going to be inspired by someone, it might as well be one of the best.

It sits in this exact spot for a reason. Right before it comes Nevermind, and the Foster the People song behind it, Hannah's favorite, wonders whether it would take a shooting star to comfort the person it's speaking to. It felt natural for the next song to answer from the point of view of a shooting star, the way Mitski did in Last Words of a Shooting Star. I had no intention of reproducing what she did. I only knew I wanted to start from there, and to borrow her method: never naming the real subject, letting an object carry it. The most obvious things are the hardest to see. One day I was listening to that song without making any connection, and suddenly it clicked.

Her song has thousands of interpretations. Some say it's about a literal death on a plane, others say it's the death of who we used to be. We'll never have a final answer, because it's music, it's art. I didn't want a final answer for Greenwood either. The vehicle here is an alarm clock: the hour I used to set to wake up with someone, warming the morning before he rose, and the alarm that outlived the relationship. It's still set. I don't take it off the phone. It's a song about trauma, and about what keeps running on its own after the person who gave it a reason is gone. Your alarm going off in a room I wasn't in, mine going off while you slept through both, and the one morning it mattered, I was the one who didn't hear.

I could say it's about grief, about agoraphobia, anxiety, depression, and it's all of that. It's also about time. Time passing, and time as an accumulation of bad things, which I come back to on the other side of this record, in Private Museum, where things get more clinical. Esther opened this side with too many possible lives. Greenwood closes it with too little time.

The name holds its own layers. Greenwood is the station in the song, the one whose clock still gets wound every Sunday by a man they pay to keep the grounds, while the platform fills with nothing but weather. It's a neighborhood. It's also the name of a cemetery in Brooklyn, and once you hear it that way, other lines change: they'll say I sleep so easy now, that I finally got my rest. Sunday is the day you wind the clock and the day people visit. In old English ballads, the greenwood is the forest you run away to, outside of everything. And it completes the name this side opened with, Esther, so the record ends exactly where her name does. It ends on the word goodnight.

Time moves differently for everyone else, too, and that's in there as well. I'll let you read it however you see it. That's the part I love most. I know what I was thinking while I wrote it. I'm no longer sure that's all I think about it now. Just like I still find something new in Mitski's songs every time, I want this one to keep surprising me too.”