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Album: The Take Off and Landing of Everything (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This Take Off and Landing of Everything track finds Elbow frontman Guy Garvey picturing himself in a couple of decade's time as an old rocker. Tainted by anger and sorrow, he is sitting in a bar, invisible to the attentions of the younger drinkers around him. Garvey told Mojo magazine: "It's an old man sitting in a young person's bar, saying, 'don't look at me as old'... there's some of me in there. My dad was as passionate about Manchester as I am, but in welcoming people rather than repelling people at the bar."

    "Something I'm experiencing the fringes of," he added, with a chuckle. "I don't like the way we treat our old people in Britain. It's so f---ing short sighted. Like we're not all gonna end up that old."

    "If the album has a theme, it's that the band are all approaching 40, and thinking about the part of life that's gone, and what's coming for the next 40, yet you're encouraged to live in the moment," Garvey concluded. "It's all these things at once."
  • Garvey sings on this song as being "from another century." He told Mojo: "The character from this song is definitely me but a bit older. In that song. The character is initially quite aggressive towards young people – which is not me – but I can understand where that comes from, because you get so frustrated when your mortality starts tapping."

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