Don't Matter Now

Album: Staying at Tamara's (2017)
Charted: 66
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Songfacts®:

  • George Ezra wrote this song for himself as a cathartic ode about his battles with anxiety. He explained in a statement:

    "I wrote 'Don't Matter Now' to remind myself, primarily, that it's okay to want to take yourself away from situations from time to time. It was one of the first new songs I wrote after Wanted On Voyage, all the way back in sunny 2015. Events from back then can seem quite trivial at this point, but the song has made more sense to me as time has gone on.

    In time I realized that it wasn't just me that was suffering from anxiety, it wasn't just me that was confused, and that there's no harm in not always understanding what's going on in the world around you."
  • Ezra has an interesting way of introducing the song. He told NME: "I tell crowds I wrote this song when the biggest thing we had to worry about was whether David Cameron had a sleepover with a pig. And it's true, those were the headlines then. But in the last 18 months it's all changed."
  • Ezra told NME about his four-pawed co-star in the music video: "The dog had a bloody agent! The dog was getting more care than I was. And on the second day of filming, it bared its teeth at me! That put me on edge. I'm still learning when it comes to music videos. But I wanted this to express a feeling, which I think it does."
  • This was the first single to be released from Staying at Tamara's. As with George Ezra's debut record, Wanted On Voyage, the album was inspired by the singer's travels. Ezra revealed to the Press Association the LP's title was drawn from a period of time he spent in a Barcelona apartment owned by a woman named Tamara with a group of fashion students, designers, artists and fellow musicians which allowed him to feel like a student.

    "What often happens with these trips is I never actually write any songs on them but the notepads are filled with what will become the songs once I dig back through them," he said.
  • Ezra sings about overload in the smartphone era during the first verse. "People reading headlines but not the article. I am guilty of that," he told The Sun. "Everyone is expected to have opinions on stuff and everyone jumps to conclusions. It's good to switch off."
  • So how did Tamara respond to being informed she was the record's titular inspiration? "When I told her I was naming the album after her, she wasn't that excited if I'm being honest," Ezra told Billboard. "It was more like, 'Yeah, go for it.' She's a cool customer living a different pace of life out there."

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