Mind Is a Prison

On the slow-paced “Mind Is A Prison,” Alec Benjamin sings about being stuck in his head with his thoughts. He first performed the song during various concerts on his Caught in the Middle World Tour, explaining that it would feature on his sophomore album:

"I’ve been writing a lot for my album and a lot about being stuck inside my head, so this song is called “My Mind Is A Prison". Maybe you can relate."

Alec first teased the release of the song on Twitter in December 2019, referring to it as “My Mind Is A Prison.” A few days later, he performed a snippet of the song in an Instagram Live Video.

The “My” in the title was discarded when the cover art was revealed. A day before the release, a photo of Alec in a fishbowl was posted on Alec’s Instagram account, captioned “getting tanked on set rn.” He explained that the music video for the song would follow shortly.

"I overthink everything and so I wanted to make a song about it. And I’m always trying to sort of get out of my own head. I have OCD so I’m always going over and over and over things and sometimes I need to just not be like that. And it’s hard. So I made a song about it and I thought if I put it out in the universe, maybe I’d find some other people who felt the same way and maybe we could all find some comfort in knowing that there are other people out there who do the same thing."

"My friend Alex Hope produced the song. She is amazing. We make most of the songs together. I just feel comfortable working with her and she’s incredibly talented and also willing to go to dark places like this with me. I write a lot of songs by myself, but I do try to collaborate with other people and I think there’s not that many people that would want to go in on a song like this with me where I’m like, “Hey, how about we write a song called my ‘Mind is a Prison.’” And so the process of making the song is pretty much that. I was at her house and we’d been sitting around for like two or three hours just kicking ideas around and nothing came out. And then she played me one song, can’t remember what it was, and gave me a little chord idea and I started with the first chorus melody. She’s like, “Oh, that’s tight.” And we made a little track and I was like, “Oh, what if it was like about my mind being a prison? But instead we actually kind of went in on the metaphor and actually wrote it about like a jailbreak.”"