Songfacts®:

• This instrumental is the title track of Irish Indie folk band Villagers' second album. Frontman and songwriter Conor O'Brien told The Sun: "I was playing it almost every day while we were touring Jackal. It just wouldn't go away so I needed to record it."
• Band member Cormac Curran, who has a degree in musicology from University College Dublin, arranged the strings. He taught both keyboards and music theory when not touring with Villagers.
• Regarding the album, O'Brien told NME: "If there's a theme to the record, if there was something I kept going back to, it was the question of 'How would I feel about this if I didn't have a well of experience already inside me? It became something I always went back to how would I write this song if I was just coming out of a mother's womb?"
• O'Brien explained the album title to Q magazine: "I liked the fact that it was the opposite of homeland and all the stuff attached to that term," he said. "Awayland is that inner space which is your own landscape that you can navigate. It's a personal internal journey."