Counting is fun. I don't think there's a simpler, more honest idea for a song on this album. One, two, three, four, etc. One of the first rituals we're taught, one of the first abstract concepts we grapple with: how much, how many. The earliest game, the basis of economics, the raw materials of mathematics, all reducible to this rote recitation of names of words for amounts of things.
My favorite Sesame Street skit growing up was the psychodelic count-to-twelve pinball cartoon. Funky soundtrack, bright colors, and all built around counting. I would watch every day hoping that they'd air that skit as part of the show. The rest of Sesame Street was okay, sure, but oh man that counting cartoon...
This sort of talky singing is unusual for me. I'm much more comfortable with melody than with sass, so my songs tend to be sung. I really dig the spectrum of possibilities in vocal performance, from the over-the-top stylized melodics of opera to the essentially a-tonal cadence and bluster of hiphop, but I can't rap and I can't do screamo and so I find myself looking admiringly at folks who can. So an excuse to try and at least step away from melody for this was fun.
The song is a set piece with Little Metal Things: they share some audio elements, a tempo, and a border, but there's also a sort of sense of good-cop-bad-cop dualism there. Both are eccentric, a-melodic, breathy nonsense, but one is crazed and jarring and the other is a sort of rudimentary joy in pop-music form.