I Lie Awake Every Night

Album: We Move (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this song, James Vincent McMorrow revisits the eating disorder that afflicted him as a teenage boy in Dublin. Between the ages of 14 to about 17, he developed anorexia and later bulimia. At his lowest point the Irish teen was hospitalized in a mental health unit weighing just over five stone (70 lbs). McMorrow explained to The Evening Standard:

    "The song was written about a point when I was hospitalized because I just wasn't coping well with life. I had friends but I didn't think about life the same way as them. It's a chicken-and-egg thing: was I unhappy because I didn't make friends easily, or did I not make friends easily because I was unhappy? There was no singular moment that happened [to trigger it]. I just have a predisposition towards control and wanting to have control of my life. The classic thing with eating disorders is that when life is out of control, it's the one thing that you can control."

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