The Curse

Album: Change of Time (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This melancholy piano ballad is a track from American singer-songwriter Josh Ritter's sixth album, So Runs the World Away. The album title comes from a line in Shakespeare's, Hamlet.
  • Ritter told Spinner UK this song spawned the rest of the record. "The first time when I really started to equate a story with the song, I realized why I love people like Flannery O'Connor," he explained. "She just lets bad things happen to the characters. I don't think the record is any darker than my other records - more happens to the characters, bad things to happen to people. That's what makes it a story."
  • This song is a love story about a mummy who pretends he's dead in New York City and a Victorian archaeologist. "For a song like that, the goal was to try and tell a full story," Ritter explained to Spinner. "You try to leave something to the imagination but you can only leave so much. It was really important to get the character just right. The narrative was simple but I really wanted the character to have a serious interaction. The fact that he was a mummy was the funniest part."

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