The first track Field Report shared from their awesome sophomore album Marigolden was “Wings,” a digital folk song that sounded like a faint white light slowly building luminosity against the black of midnight. Now comes one of the album’s most upbeat songs, “Home (Leave The Lights On),” a sure sign of evolution for the band. In contrast to the emotional bloodletting of Field Report’s debut album, “Home” seems downright cheery, although it was originally written for a commercial and rejected for being too sad. That’s crazy; this thing captures exactly the sort of wistful sentiments Don Draper likes to zero in on. In our recent interview, Field Report’s Chris Porterfield had this to say about it:

I think that song represents that there aren’t any rules for us. You know, it doesn’t all have to be sort of sad, downtempo, whatever. At the end of the day, it’s just about the words and how we choose to frame those, and the way that that one came about — actually, we wrote that for a commercial. A good chunk of that song is written for a commercial, and the client passed on it because it was too sad, and then we were in the studio deciding which songs we wanted to record and people kept coming back to that one like, “Oh, there’s something here.” So we did it and gave it the Wilburys treatment and it was just super fun, and it just feels really good to play that and to have that on the record. And I think it’s one of those tunes that people can get right away, but I think lyrically there’s enough in there to live in it for a while. And some lines will still sneak up on you and reveal themselves later on. But you know, I don’t want to have this band be a consciously unwelcoming thing, like we can’t have fun or we can’t do something uptempo. And so yeah, I think leading off with that as a single, (a) I think it’s probably got the biggest umbrella for people to just find their own space underneath, and then that can be transferred to the whole record for them. But (b) yeah, I think there was a part of me that wanted to say, you know, not all the tunes have to be so overtly bummed out. We can have a little fun or even have a little private smile with ourselves about the fact that this is sort of like a Petty song.

Stream “Home” below.

(via Time)

Marigolden is out 10/7 on Partisan. Pre-order it in MP3, CD, and vinyl formats.