5 Years Time

Album: Peaceful The World Lays Me Down (2008)
Charted: 7
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Songfacts®:

  • This glorious summer song about having fun being in the sun and enduring love was originally going to be part of a four-track EP. However according to songwriter Charlie Fink, when they took it to their record label, they said: "You should probably do more with this."
  • Laura Marling provides backing vocals on this track. The teenage singer-songwriter used to play with Noah and the Whale before striking out on her own. She also went out with Charlie Fink for a time and Noah and the Whale's second album, First Days Of Spring is a concept record based on Fink's relationship with Marling and his emotional meltdown after she broke it off.
  • This single was Noah and the Whale's commercial breakthrough. Fink told the Sunday Times July 6, 2008: "If someone had told me the potential was there for such things to happen with the song, I would have laughed. It seems completely absurd and terrifying. But I still love it, it still means what it meant to me when I wrote it." He then acknowledged that this song has, "the ability to produce joy in people who hear it."
  • Charlie Fink told The Sun newspaper August 8, 2008: "A lot of people tell me that song has the ability to create joy in their lives, though at the same time I think it's rather melancholy. It's a kind of fantasy song about love that hasn't happened yet."
  • During an interview with Gigwise, Charlie Fink was told this song was used to advertise Scrubs on Comedy Central. He responded to the news: "Really? It's very frustrating and ultimately annoying because as a band basically you have no say over what TV uses your song. I'm always being told that someone heard our song on a cookery programme or on some other random show. You have no say in it. It's kinda frustrating, although sometimes it may come up on Match of the Day, and that's cool."
  • "5 Years Time" plays in a scene of the 2025 Superman movie directed by James Gunn. It soundtracks a sequence where Mister Terrific battles Luthor's security forces, with the whimsical music contrasting with the intense action.

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