I'm Done with the World (& It's Done with Me)

Album: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost - Part 1 (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • This atmospheric ballad originated with some chords that Foals guitarist Jimmy Smith came up with. Smith, who was in Germany at the time, sent them to the band's vocalist Yannis Philippakis.

    Some days later, Philippakis woke up hung over. It was late October and the leaves were turning in the trees. As the singer wandered into the garden of the house he lives in with his girlfriend, he noticed there was a wounded fox on top of his shed. "There's something about that day I won't forget," he recalled to Q magazine," I felt raw."

    As Philippakis tended to the fox, he started thinking about how he would like to have children running around the garden at some point. He then walked to the studio, listening to Jimmy Smith's music for this song on the way. Still feeling tender, the vocalist came up with the lyrics in one go, as soon as he arrived at the studio.

    "I would like to have children one day," he told Q. "I would like to have a daughter. That song is written for that moment in the future to say 'Hey I wrote this song about you before you were born. Before you were even a hint.' There's not even a suspicion of a child on the horizon. But hopefully at some point there will be. So I want it to be like a gift."
  • The song is the closing track on Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost - Part 1. The album is the first half of a two-piece project. Philippakis told The Sun:

    "There is a sense of confrontation in the lyrics and an energy to the song that is us blowing off steam. I want it to be like, I am actually just exhausted by it.

    And that track leads into the second album, which is a response to that track. It kicks off with a lot of energy and a lot of urgency but it flips around. There is a sense of perseverance in the songs at the start of album two."

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