Safe and Sound

Album: For Him And The Girls (1999)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Safe and Sound" is the tenth track on Hawksley Workman's debut album, For Him and the Girls. Workman wrote about the song on his website: "One night, i quietly wrote, what i wanted to be, the quintessential driving song… it's turned into a rather popular song for weddings…"

    In 2014 when we asked Hawksley how he feels about this, he replied: "It's a big life event that you want to celebrate and it's kind of exciting for me that that song has that life."
  • Workman wrote the song in 1998 on a piano in the apartment he lived in with his then girlfriend. "I had imagined this song as traveling with her at the time and she was asleep," Hawksley told us. "So I guess the images were all there waiting to be plucked."

    He continued, "It's interesting that it does come across as a wedding song because in my late teens, I was very pious. So I had a lot of biblical imagery floating around back then. My first few records are loaded with it."
  • Workman's idea about "Safe and Sound" being about traveling is evident in the first verse:

    You slept through the last small town
    I'll wake you up when the next one comes around
    Your eyes are closed like you truly believe
    You're safe and sound with me

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