“This one is almost embarrassingly literal. Ride Back Home and What The Fuck Do I Know? happen on the same night. That's how they were born, as two halves of one evening.

When you're trying to get over someone, with whatever tools you have or don't, there's a point where it becomes suffocating to stay in one place breathing only yourself. Age and experience have nothing to do with it. So you start doing what you never did. You go out all the time, you chase new things, as if that could peel you off the reality you shared with that person. And any ride back home is already a little sad.

The song opens on new pumps and fresh steps. It's supposed to be a new life. You're still walking the same steps in the same place. Those shoes belong to the same domestic universe as Almost, where the good shoes are worn once, back when she thought it was possible, and then go back in the box, still new.

Getting closer to home brings you closer to exactly the loneliness you were dodging at the peak of the night, and it hits twice as hard. That's the echo of Tastes A Little Like You. Distraction is fine. You'd be feeling it anyway. What the song catches is the way we fool ourselves in that moment, and I'll probably fool myself again. Look how good I'm doing. Saying it out loud convinces you too. And then, in the back seat, with cold fries in your lap and rain on the window, you remember that you went out to forget them, and that at some point during the night you still watched three dots appear and disappear, sent the drunk text, got left on read, and ended up scrolling back through old photos, blinded by how happy the screen looked. My phone even chose that exact moment to bring up a memory of us, which is why the camera roll is in the song.

If the message comes, it will hurt. If it doesn't, it will hurt too. You can't outrun yourself. It's lonely, yes. Loneliness can be shared, and you're allowed to feel it. The bridge asks for very little: one warm hug would do. Most of the time we do look for comfort in someone else, in a touch, a hug, a presence, even one that bothers you when it's right there beside you.

It's dark, nocturnal synthpop, and I love that the beat never really falls apart. The car keeps moving. The city keeps moving. You're the only thing inside it that suddenly can't keep the same rhythm. Together with What The Fuck Do I Know?, it lives in the same electronic corridor of the record, two neighboring rooms of one long night.

Trivia: it was written about one very specific night. My best friend was visiting from another city and we decided I needed to go out. We went to a drag festival and it was wonderful. I truly believed I was fine. Then, in the early hours, a message from my ex arrived. He was in the hospital at the time, recovering from the accident I wrote about in Inches, on the other side of this record. Today I can see it as him showing his manipulative claws. A lot had happened before that, things I was angry about and hurt by, and still I felt responsible for him. You get that horrible combination: worried, angry that you're worried, guilty for being out, angry that you feel guilty for being out. None of those feelings cancel the others. Back then I felt doubly lonely, doubly a traitor, doubly everything, because he always managed to make me the guilty one. That ride home was lonely twice over: I felt guilty for his loneliness and for mine. My friend deserved a better ending to that night.”