Album: Utopian Ashes (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the closing track of Utopian Ashes, a duets album written and recorded by Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie and Savages singer Jehnny Beth. Its nine country-soul songs trace the story of a dissolving relationship between a married couple. This closing confessional finds their marriage at a breaking point.
  • Gillespie and Beth sparked this collaboration in 2015 when both appeared at Suicide's farewell UK show at London's Barbican. The Savages frontwoman joined Primal Scream to sing Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's "Some Velvet Morning" at The Downs festival in Bristol in 2016, after which there were two exploratory five-day sessions in Paris the following year.

    Gillespie told Mojo that as soon as they started collaborating, he sent Beth songs like Luther Ingram's "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" and George Jones and Tammy Wynette's "We're Gonna Hold On." He told her, "I want to make music with this level of intensity - grown-up songs, about adult struggle. I didn't want it to be just a boy-girl romantic breakup record. It had to be people who had a house, kids, a history - people with something to lose."
  • Gillespie described this track as "a song of disgust, a sentient being asking for re-admittance to the human race."
  • Hello, how are you?
    You're such an act
    Hello, how are you?
    Talking trash


    The song sums up the album's message that we don't have long on this Earth. So run your race, make the most of life, rather than ruining it by falling out with loved ones. "It's so easy to get angry over the way a dishwasher is loaded, while outside there is a full moon," Gillespie said. "Life is such a beautiful thing, and it's so easy to lose sight of that. That's what the record's about."
  • Gillespie and Beth wrote the song with Primal Scream guitarist Andrew Innes and Beth's musical and romantic partner, Johnny Hostile.

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