Small Song is a single taken from Paddlefish’s new album Flyer.

The album was written over the course of principal songwriter Owen Misterovich’s first year away from his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, and inspired by the disappointment he experienced after moving to Chicago at the age of seventeen, where he found himself braving the first harsh winter in a windowless dorm room in the heart of the city. The record shares eight impeccable tales of this experience with infectious stories of failed space travel, dorm-room spiders, and never-ending highways.

Influenced by artists like Neil Young and The Band, with loving nods towards The Flaming Lips and Wilco, Small Song opens with a low-fi acoustic guitar and plunges into a vibrant, swirling world that echoes the near psychedelic experience Misterovich had in the state between being awake and asleep. The event, during which he hallucinated colorful insects swarming over his immobile body, was so powerful he wrote the song the morning after, and immediately recorded it with his brother Joe.

Set to a carefree, catchy melody that oddly enough perfectly befits the sinister nature of the song as it quickly becomes a portrait of mental unrest, the physical manifestation of his growing pains.

Stream it here.