Pulling Quotes

Two people sit across from each other, each quietly taking notes on the other. One is gathering material, the other is deciding what to reveal, and neither is entirely sure whether this is love or an assignment. That is the odd, funny and slightly chilling territory of “Pulling Quotes,” the second track on Cola’s 2024 album The Gloss.

The song sounds lovely, which is part of its trick. A drone-heavy bass, an open and bright arrangement and a vocal that never raises its voice carry a story about intimacy gone professional. Listening closely, you hear a romance that has learned to talk like a newsroom.

Where the song came from

Cola is a Montreal band built from the remains of another one. Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworthy spent years in Ought, and they began writing with drummer Evan Cartwright (of U.S. Girls) in late 2019, trading ideas between Montreal and Toronto before Ought’s breakup and Cola’s debut were announced on the same day in November 2021.^[5] Their first album, Deep in View, arrived in 2022. The Gloss followed on June 14, 2024, through Fire Talk Records.^[3]

The origin of this particular song is unusually well documented. Darcy has said that Stidworthy sent over a demo built around the melodic limits of the uilleann pipes, an instrument Stidworthy was learning, and that the bassline imitates the pipes’ constant drone.^[1] The song therefore starts from an old, folk-rooted texture and then rubs it against a very modern subject.

It did not arrive easily. Stidworthy has recalled that Darcy did not like the demo at first, and that he and Cartwright had to be persistent. Without a vocal, he said, the song would have died.^[2] Darcy admitted he procrastinated and did not see the vision, and that the song pushed him outside his comfort zone.^[2] Then, as he later told the press, he wrote the entire vocal in a single afternoon, close to its final form, which rarely happens.^[1]

That history matters for the meaning. A song that Darcy resisted and then completed in one sitting has the feel of a thing that was waiting to be said. The reluctance and the sudden flow both seem to live in the finished track.

Lovers as reporters

Darcy’s own summary is the best entry point. He describes a relationship in which two people approach each other like journalists, or perhaps even are journalists.^[1] Because the music felt so bright and open to him, he thought the words needed to be a little cheeky, though he also pointed to real pathos in the darker bridge.^[1]

The central conceit is that attention can be a form of extraction. When someone listens to you in order to use what you say, the conversation changes shape. Every confession becomes a potential headline, and every pause becomes a place to probe. The song lets that dynamic play out in a romantic setting, where the stakes are supposed to be tenderness and instead become angles and access.

What makes this feel true is how ordinary it is. Most of us have watched a date turn into an interview, or felt ourselves rehearsing the version of our story that will play best. The narrator and the person across from them are both performing curiosity. The question the song leaves hanging is whether the performance can ever curdle back into the real thing.

Mediation and the modern crush

Stidworthy, who made the video, framed it around the cycles of desire and deception in our relationships. He mentioned doom scrolling, stalking, assumptions and projections, and the roles we play that we have seen on television, and he described the whole piece as a way of navigating through all this mediation to work out what is real.^[1]

That vocabulary clarifies the song’s larger target. We now meet one another already edited. We read profiles before faces, screenshot before we respond, and keep a running archive of what people have said to us. In that world, the habit of collecting someone’s words, of pulling the good bits and holding them up as evidence, is not a quirk of reporters. It is how a great many of us court, argue and remember.

The title, borrowed from publishing, points straight at this. A pull quote is the line a magazine lifts out of an article and sets large on the page to catch the eye. It is the sentence that stands for the whole. Applied to a person, the idea is both flattering and a little cruel: to be reduced to your most quotable moment.

The gloss and the margins

The song belongs to an album whose title does similar work. In interviews the band explained that a gloss can be a commentary or critique, but that it also evokes the superficial sheen of a magazine.^[2] Another meaning, connected to medieval manuscripts, is the note written in the margin of a text. Darcy has said the word evokes writing in the margins of a book, and the band’s zine for the album used illuminated-manuscript imagery, with snails drawn as a nod to marginalia.^[2][4]

Both senses fit “Pulling Quotes.” The relationship in the song is full of commentary about itself, and it is also glossy in the sense of looking better than it is. The two people annotate each other constantly, yet the annotations stay in the margin and never quite reach the center of the page.

Cartwright suggested the album title, and Darcy described the term as multivalent.^[2] That openness is deliberate. The band has described The Gloss as lighter and shimmerier than Deep in View, a record with taut songs, more bass drone and repetition drawn from folk melodies.^[2] The brightness is a surface, and the songs ask what lies beneath it.

How the words work

Darcy has been candid that the lyrics on this record are narrative-based but intentionally freewheeling and obfuscated, taking poetic license rather than aiming for clear storytelling.^[2][4] He has named the poet John Ashbery, whom he called the quintessential anti-meaning, meaning guy, and described a wish to ground songs in the mundane while using a wide, fuzzy lens to suggest something ineffable.^[4] He also spoke of a modern American tradition of slacker poetry and the redemption of the banal.^[4]

This approach suits a song about interpretation. A lyric that refuses to settle on a single reading invites exactly the behavior it describes, which is the listener hunting for the lines worth lifting. Anyone who sets out to quote this song will find that the most memorable moments resist being cut loose from their context, and that the cheekiness and the sadness arrive together.

Darcy also noted how much space there is in the song.^[2] The spaciousness works almost like a stage direction. Between the phrases, the music leaves room for the silence of someone deciding what to say next, which is the moment at which one person becomes a source and the other a subject.

Where it sits on the album

The Gloss runs just under forty minutes and was recorded and mixed by Valentin Ignat, with Darcy on vocals and guitar, Stidworthy on bass (and organ on this track) and Cartwright on drums.^[3] Cartwright was a full songwriting member this time, which reshaped the band’s sound. Darcy remarked that in Ought the songs were often carved out of enormous jams, while Cola’s songs are fairly apparent from the start.^[3]

Reviewers noticed the effect. Pitchfork praised the record’s focus and economy, along with a nervous, claustrophobic tension, while Rolling Stone described the band as products of our own more ambiently dehumanized times and called the guitar work top-shelf minimalist racket.^[3] Line of Best Fit admired the winsome romanticism and righteous anger but found it occasionally hard to tell which moments were tongue-in-cheek and which were sincere.^[3] Metacritic placed the album at 79 out of 100, and it appeared on year-end lists from both Pitchfork and Rolling Stone.^[3]

That last complaint about irony and sincerity is arguably the point of “Pulling Quotes.” The song is built so that you cannot fully tell which register the narrator is speaking in, because the narrator may not know either.

Other ways to hear it

One reading takes the song as a satire of media culture. The journalist metaphor is literal, and the targets are the glossy, extractive habits of the press and the platforms. In this view the love story is a convenient costume for a critique of how we consume one another’s lives.

Another reading is purely romantic, and gentler. Perhaps the two people are simply cautious, each afraid to be the first to be sincere, and so they retreat into the safer posture of the observer. The distance is a defense rather than a scheme, and the bright music is the hope that the defense will eventually drop.

A third reading turns the lens on songwriting itself. A band that mines private life for lyrics lives with the same ethical tension as a reporter. Darcy has said he now sees himself less as a frontman and more as a musician, and he described the band’s approach as one of charming humility rather than rock-star theatrics.^[4] Read that way, the song is an artist glancing at his own trade and admitting how closely it resembles the one he is describing.

Why it resonates

“Pulling Quotes” lands because it names something many listeners feel but rarely say. Our closest relationships now run through screens, archives and the constant awareness of being observed. The suspicion that affection and surveillance have grown hard to tell apart is a sensible response to the way we live.

It also lands because it is funny. The cheekiness Darcy described keeps the song from becoming a lecture, and the warmth of the arrangement keeps the cynicism from hardening. You come away amused, a little uneasy and oddly moved.

In the end, the song asks whether you can ever fully know someone you are also trying to describe. Its answer seems to be that you can try, provided you remember to put the notebook down.