Life Goes On

Album: The Papercut Chronicles II (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the second single by hip hop band Gym Class Heroes, off their fifth studio album, The Papercut Chronicles II. It finds frontman Travie McCoy getting all reflective as he spits verses about dealing with what life throws at you and moving on from the hard times, because "life goes on." The single was released on October 18, 2011 via iTunes.
  • The song features the Danish Electro-Pop singer-songwriter Oh Land crooning the chorus. Oh Land was born Nanna Øland Fabricius and she decided to adopt a music career after an injury forced her to give up ballet dancing. Her debut album, Fauna was released in Denmark on November 10, 2008. She worked with producers Dan Carey, Dave McCracken and Pharrell Williams for her self-titled follow-up, which was released on March 15, 2011 in the US peaking at #184 on the Billboard 200.
  • Fun Fact: Oh Land is the great-great-grandchild of missionary and ethnographer Otto Fabricius, who in 1780 published Fauna Groenlandica, the first zoological observations of Greenland.
  • The Papercut Chronicles II acts a follow-up to the band's 2003 debut album The Papercut Chronicles. Frontman Travis McCoy told MTV News: "The title The Papercut Chronicles, it actually came from a mixtape that I made for an ex-girlfriend of mine. But it definitely went much deeper for me, because the first album chronicled about three or four years in my life that were some of the darkest years I've experienced; a lot of those songs touch on the things I was going through during those times. So, for me, titling this record The Papercut Chronicles II, in a sense, it chronicles what's gone on since we put that album out."
  • McCoy told Reuters that The Papercut Chronicles II demonstrates a maturity compared with the band's previous work with songs about moving ahead after lost loves and how a rock star life is not always glamorous. "It's thinking about the bigger picture rather than the smaller things," he said. "I'm 30. We've all grown up now, some of us have kids."

    The singer added that the album became a personal diary to some extent. "'Live Goes On' defines me best, because people don't see that this life is not all glitz and glamour. There's a darker side," he said.

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