The lyrics are my take on religion. I'm into a lot of meditating. My Dad was Catholic and he tried to school me in that, but I never really caught on. I'm always interested in religion and the way it effects society. The "Starseed" thing is about going out on a meditation journey and coming back with something tangible. Something you actually believe in. Something that means something to me. In Western society, trying to have that incorporated into any religion would be hard to accept. Most people are hard pressed to change their views. I realized with my Dad you can't change the old dog.- Raine Maida, FMQB Radio Interview, 24 Mar. 1995

It was based on this book by Ken Carey, The Starseed Transmission, about a channeling experience he had. I took the premise of that and combined it with Western religion and how it's so hard to convince my father's generation of anything other than the religious values instilled in them.

My dad tried to raise me as a Catholic. Every time I talk about religion with [him] it's kind of tough, you just kind of have to go about it on your own and persevere under the duress of your family, usually.

I think our whole generation is looking for [answers] and looking for bits and parts of religion and not being sucked in by the whole stringent approach, like Catholicism and stuff like that. And the [song's] whole chorus is about if you've had this channeling experience and found something that actually meant something to you, bringing it back and trying to convince anybody else is not always an easy task.

We're obviously not the first generation to [seek spiritual answers], but it seems really relevant right now, especially the last few years with the economy and everything, everyone's questioning stuff. Especially my three years at the University [of Toronto], it seemed like everybody was just passing time, and they knew they wouldn't have a job [upon graduation]. They were still going through the motions. It's just been a weird few years.

I think these days with the whole global village, information is so readily available, you can learn about Taoism or any type of philosophy or religion, so you can pick good things out of all of them and make your own... If you are going to have religion, it should be something you're comfortable with, not something you're fighting.- Raine Maida, Billboard, May 1995

It's this weird song where, for whatever reason, I was reading a lot about transcendental meditation and I was reading the Starseed book by Kesey, but it became this song that I wanted to kind of levitate out of the room.

We really liked it but we didn't love it. I liked the message of it and I liked where it was lyrically, and as a song it felt good, but for whatever reason at that point we just felt it was too poppy. Not a sellout, but it didn’t have the kind of depth the other songs had for us. It was one of those things where it was fine and it was there for us, and then all of a sudden when we handed in our record — cause the label hadn’t really heard anything — they were like, ‘This is great. We want this to be the single.’ We just fought tooth and nail. I think at one point I was like, ‘F--k it, we’re not putting this on the record if that’s going to be the first thing that represents us.’ We ended up convincing the label to go with 'The Birdman' first, but obviously 'Starseed' did OK for us. Luckily my ego didn’t get in the way and people — the label did something good for sure.

When you’re young and kind of new that way, you can kind of get in front of yourself for the wrong reasons. I didn’t see the big picture. That’s kind of the beauty, and maybe it can be detrimental as well, but that Naveed record, we were so isolated. It was just the four of us and a producer. No one heard what we were doing. The label, we’d signed the deal at that point, but I don’t think they really cared. It was a really small record deal. We were doing demos and kind of making an indie record anyways, and they just said, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing.’ It wasn’t a big priority or anything.- Raine Maida, CBC, 21 Mar. 2014