Fingerprints - (Nai Palm, Simon Mavin) Commentary Songtext
von Hiatus Kaiyote

Fingerprints was one of the first songs I ever wrote
Wrote it when I was about like 16 and uhmm
So I′m an orphan, and essentially it's about a tribute to childhood and like hanging on to that
But also growing through your loss, yeah
And so fi-fingerprints
There′s a line in it that's like "The grubby fingerprints that kissed the walls have vanished"
And that is uhmm, there was a hallway that had a clint image at the end of the hallway

It was the lovers or the kiss, I think it's called the kiss
And me and my brothers used to practice Spider-Man climbing up the walls
And my mom used to be furious ′cause of all these little fingerprints
That went all the way up to the roof
And she could tell that we′ve been doing it
'Cause there′d be all this like, grubby little handprints
So yeah, it's like "The grubby fingerprints have vanished"
As in like, you know, it′s, it's a memory of something


This certain little key moments of my childhood that kind of pop out
And you′ll be, you know, you'll be surprised
It's always like something really random like that you think of
Uhmm, yeah, but it was really amazing that the boys were like
I was like "Oh, no that′s an old song, it′s terrible, we're not using that"
And they′re like "No, you should, we should put it on the album
Because, you know, because it's, because it′s cool"
And so, I was really, it was really amazing that the boys supported
Something that I, you know, it's something that such
That holds part of my songwriting lineage

Well alright, well the track "Fingerprints" was written by Nai
A long time ago, she wrote it when she was young
And she brought it to the band
Pretty much in the beginning when we first met
So we′ve been playing it for quite a while
We developed it live, and it's got a similar vibe to Nakamarra, I guess
So we thought we'd take a similar approach
and we did when we recorded Nakamarra

And we just recorded it live pretty much
With instruments and we got vocals
So we used a, a Stellavox mixer which goes straight to a stereo track
When you finish the, the live tracking
So, there′s, there′s no mixing or doing post stuff on that tracks
So, it's, it′s a pretty limiting way to do it, but it ends up being a, a good way
Because, you know, you get the sound, and you like it
And you go, "that's it" and that′s what you have to work with


So, yeah, it was really good to do that process
We, we did it on a few tracks, for the record
But, I guess it's much prominent on this one
Because we didn′t really add much, we didn't really do much in post
We did do a bit of synthesis and vocals
But other than that it's, you can really hear the bare bones of what we were playing