Birch Tree

Album: What Went Down (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • This song finds vocalist and lyricist Yannis Philippakis looking back. He explained to The Sun: "I feel my world has become smaller and that song is partly to do with nostalgia for a place you used to go."

    "Reconnecting with old friends and realizing how many different lives you've lived and how you don't live the same life as others from day to day," he added. "It's about getting older and age."
  • Talking about the song to NME, Philippakis explained that the sound was written, "hungover in Utrecht, onstage doing a soundcheck." He continued: "It felt kind of consoling at the time. Then we worked on it in Oxford, then I got really into this boxy old drum machine, and so the kind of hip-hop quality of the groove came from that. It feels summery to me, it has a sense of what West Coast music should be."

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