Rostam’s first solo single is an immediate departure from his work with Vampire Weekend, an indie rock band, and Discovery, an electro-pop group. It was released to digital stores and streaming services on January 28, 2016, about 4 ½ years after its Soundcloud upload date.

In “Wood”, a mostly instrumental track, he gives an ethereal vocal delivery over a clearly Eastern-influenced track. The lyrics have a clear nature theme, but it’s definite with the usage of the pronoun “you” that he’s talking to or about someone else. Perhaps it’s a relationship song like “EOS?”

He wrote on his Instagram that he wanted the song to…

capture the feeling of being in bed with someone, and dreaming something wild beside them. In 2008 I moved into a tiny room in Brooklyn Heights that could fit a bed and not much else, but I loved this room to death because it had an enormous window facing the backyards of the block. A lot of time spent in my first relationship was the two of us in that bed with the sun coming through the window in the morning— and I’m sure that inspired the lyrics of this song.

Rostam created the beat on an airplane. He also talked about this on his Instagram:

it was a beat I made with cut up tabla and digital sitar and me trying to push myself to write the hardest, fastest, most classical violin parts I could. I spent years trying to figure out what to sing on top of it — even recording real string players without a vocal part written —before realizing that everything would have to clear out before my voice could enter the picture.