When You Are Young

Album: Night Thoughts (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • During the period when he was writing the lyrics for Night Thoughts, Brett Anderson found himself lying awake in the small hours, thinking and worrying about parenthood. The Suede vocalist told The Sun with a smile: "This is the first album I have written since becoming a fully fledged biological parent. And one of the key things on the record is that having a child myself has awakened so many memories of being a child, which has been really interesting."
  • This is the opening track of the album and it finds Anderson reflecting back to his own childhood. He said: "When my little boy was a baby and I was feeding him baby food, I had this moment where he dribbled and I scraped his mouth with it and I suddenly felt a ghost memory of my mum doing the exact thing to me. Also, when I pick him up by his armpits, I feel my mum doing the same to me."

    "These little things that lay dormant in my head for 45 years are suddenly reawakened. It makes you remember parts of your life you've forgotten about."
  • Brett Anderson explained the album title to Mojo: "I have been listening to Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, and that's very thematically linked, so much so that people have said it is their first ever concept album. You enter this world of whiskey-soaked regret at two or three in the morning. It paints this very vivid picture and I suppose I was thinking of that when I came up with the title Night Thoughts. Being alone in the world when everyone's asleep."

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