Cursive’s sixth album Mama, I’m Swollen hits stores next week via the Omaha band’s longstanding hometown label Saddle Creek. We’ve heard a couple tracks, including the downcast and then flat-out poppy “From The Hips.” When the band submitted their Progress Report, they told us to expect the new album to be “moodier, certainly moodier than Happy Hollow.” What they didn’t tell us, though, was to expect a title track that sounded like Sting. We asked front man Tim Kasher about the album and the Sting-y song.

How’d you come up with the title Mama, I’m Swollen?
“Swollen” best sums up the various themes of the record: procreation, ego, sexuality, all things bruised … And “Mama” seemed like the appropriate person to whine to.

As far as the title track, we move from birth to Mirror Stage to an “ink blot shaped like Zeus.” The speaker is both religion and politics, body and blood, earthquake and flood, “not an egg” but “a runny yoke”… a sort of everything and nothing. Can you explain the story going on in the song?
It might be easier to understand with signposts at each verse: the first verse is birth, second verse is adulthood, and the third bridge is a response from… ???? If one believed in God, I suppose it would be God. I prefer thinking the response is from Mama.

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Keep on on live dates at the band’s MySpace.