the album; it is about "letting go anchors of pain". "Papa", a solo vocal-and-piano piece, is not about her own father but a "different kind of daddy". The Fender Rhodes-driven "C'est la Vie" is an "angry" song and the only one on the album not to include the piano, and Carlton has said it is about the single time she was "dumped" and her inability to speak French; she said that to her, the phrase c'est la vie meant "f[uck] it", and that it helped her overcome emotional pain during the breakup. She wrote "San Francisco" in the city. "Half a Week Before the Winter" is a Goth-influenced "dark song" that Carlton intended as a metaphor for Charles Darwin's theory and the concept of "survival of the fittest": "Those beautiful animals [unicorns] again could be a symbol for so many things, they die and they shouldn't and I think it's also part my take on the music industry and how so many beautiful things that you do get eaten by the Vampires". Carlton stated in one of her concerts that "She Floats" is about a ghost in her closet, the screaming in the song is her and her producer, Stephan Jenkins screaming. "The Wreckage", the album's closing hidden track, is about Carlton's boredom while driving and her desire to start car accidents. She said "Morning Sting", a song that was dropped from the album, is about "emotions being so raw in the morning". She excluded it from the album because although she did not feel like it was "crappy", she wanted Harmonium to contain a certain number of songs. The album shares its name with a keyboard instrument, the harmonium, but Carlton said she adopted the word and made her own definition for it; she intended it as a portmanteau of the words harmony and pandemonium to define the approach to the recording of the album, which she described as "kind of an organized, chaotic approach where I wanted to maintain and preserve that wild abandon to creating." Carlton considered working with Be Not Nobody producer and A&M Records president Ron Fair on the album but decided not to do so, although Fair is credited as the album's co-executive producer. She said that much of Fair's "own aesthetic [and] tastes" were present in the arrangements of the songs on Be Not Nobody, in contrast to Harmonium, where "the dominant taste