Wiki
-
Length
4:46
“Gila” is a song about a Gatsby-eque lover who foolishly thinks that they can recreate the past. As a result this ends up damaging their future, and the future of their children.
Victoria compares “Gila” to “Heart of Chambers” because they both have “dark sass” and “witchy mysticism.”
It was somewhere in Mississippi that we put the pieces of ‘Gila’ together. All of these songs were written in different places, because we kept having to move.
The meaning of the word Gila is not exactly clear. It could be a reference to the poisonous Gila monster, or it could be that gila means “crazy” in Malay and Indonesian.
This song was sampled on The Weeknd’s “Loft Music”.
(2/27/08): “‘Gila’, well, that just started out as a great word as we were traveling throughout the Southwest. I don’t know, words tend to do that; they don’t go away, they build levels of subtext, they become characters themselves. ‘Gila’ is definitely a feeling, it’s indescribable, it’s not necessarily a gila monster. It can be something that’s actual or something that’s untouchable.” ~ Victoria, Ear Farm
(7/9/08): “I’m going to say in terms of writing the one that took the longest was ‘Gila.’… ‘Gila’ took the most time because we were trying to find the right . . . like the chorus is something that I wrote in a hotel and it emerged a couple of months later so it was like bits and pieces that grew together. It took a while to make sense. But when it did, it was fine. It was good. It was just an example of trying to make something happen too quickly, giving it the time, you know.” ~ Victoria, Village Voice
(2/20/18): “It was somewhere in Mississippi that we put the pieces of ‘Gila’ together. All of these songs were written in different places, because we kept having to move.” ~ Victoria, VinylMePlease
Track descriptions on Last.fm are editable by everyone. Feel free to contribute!
All user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.
