Songfacts®:

• "All The Birds Have Flown" was an outtake from the band's 2007 album Roots & Echoes. Frontman James Skelly explained on his record label's website why it wasn't originally included on the album: "I'd written it quite early on during the album sessions and I really wish we'd put it on the album to be honest and I'm quite gutted that we didn't. It was written as this weird kind of Leonard Cohen song, we got it together quickly, it sounded good in the batch of first tunes for the LP and we did a demo and it sounded good, we recorded it with Ian Broudie and then with [producer] Craig [Silvey], which is the version on The Singles Collection. We just over listened to it and because of that it never made the album and it's better than some of the songs on it. I wanted it to be a single but it didn't get a great reaction (laughs)."
• Skelly explained that the story told in the song is similar to "Eleanor Rigby" by fellow Liverpool band the Beatles. He said: "The story is like Eleanor Rigby. It's about this woman in Liverpool who fed the pigeons and she'd talk to herself and I'd think is she there or am I the only one who sees her. The image stuck in my head."