Songfacts®:

• This torch song finds Jehnny Beth asking the question, "Is it human to adore life?" The lyrics stem back to an obsessional childhood anxiety of Beth's. "I had one fear, which was to become bitter, because I had witnessed that in adults," she recalled to The Guardian.
• When Savages first played the song in New York, it took on the weight of the Charlie Hebdo Paris attacks. (Beth knew several people who were killed at the Bataclan – French music industry colleagues that she worked with via her own label, Pop Noire.)
• The video, which is directed by Anders Malmberg (Mew, Mø) with lighting and concept design by Tobias Rylander (The xx, Lykke Li, FKA Twigs), finds Jehnny Beth looking right down the camera. (Not unlike Sinead O'Connor in her famous "Nothing Compares 2 U" clip.)
• When drummer Fay Milton first heard the lyrics for this song, she almost cried. Milton told NME: "They made me think of not wanting to die, which is one of my biggest fears if you're enjoying life. It's something we all block out but it's there and those lyrics made me face up to that and think about how much I enjoy life and how much I don't want to die and how scared of it I actually am."
• The idea for the song came to Beth when she was looking at the poetry shelves in a San Francisco bookshop. She recalled to Pitchfork:
  
  "I found this book called Crime Against Nature by a poet called Minnie Bruce Pratt. It's about her specific story about leaving her family and abandoning her children for a woman. It's really touching. The idea of doing something big for love and the guilt that you have to deal with afterwards was really interesting for me. How much love comes with its opposite: fear, jealousy, anxiety, abandon.
  
  And the story touched me because what she realized is that she was a poet. She had a very conventional life - a husband and two kids - and was bored to death. But then she overcame that and realized there was something else in life that could let her be the person she was supposed to become. And I think that's what you [make art] for, so you can pass that on."