Mind Over Matter Tracklist
On January 21, 2014, Young the Giant released their 13 track album entitled Mind Over Matter. This, Young the Giant’s Sophomore outing, was a difficult mountain to climb. After hit songs such as “Cough Syrup” and “Apartment”, it was tough for the band to decide what exactly they wanted to be in the midst of the pressure to continue to appeal to their well deserved fan base. Sameer Gadhia (lead vocalist and lyricist) described this feeling in an interview with Rolling Stone:
After getting off the road, [after the first tour] when we started recording and writing again we were more omniscient of the fact that we had an audience, that we had a group of people that already connected with from the last record. So there was this great amount of pressure that we’d created among ourselves as we’d continued to isolate ourselves and continue to get in our own heads, to connect and continue to connect.
Mind Over Matter, then, is the story of Young the Giant’s journey to understanding this pressure as an obstacle to their progression as a band. Rather than overcoming it, the band quite literally put mind over matter and simply sought to understand it as part of their story. Sameer further explained the concept in another interview with Rolling Stone:
The idea of Mind Over Matter could be many different things, but for us it was a little mantra of trying to get past these certain obstacles that one makes three-dimensional, but which are actually a figment of our own imagination. The record was trying to objectively see that. It wasn’t trying to take a stance on it and say ‘all obstacles are bad,’ or ‘all obstacles need to be surpassed.’
