Songfacts®:

• Villagers mainman Conor O'Brien first wrote this song during his time with Irish avant garde rock quartet The Immediate in the mid-2000s, and it subsequently evolved into the version that can be heard on (Awayland). He explained to WhiteTapes: "In the song I'm trying to give the expression of things that language can't express and I wanted to use language to describe that, which doesn't make sense but I wanted to try and talk about those moments... whether it's physical violent action or sex or death, stuff that you can't, physically, put into words, really. That's what the song's about. It like 'off goes the bell, ringing through my head, signifies that's all's been said.' It was an experiment. Before the Villagers' version I listened to lots of Bossanova stuff. The song used to have different chords. One of the lyrics I stole from my time from The Immediate is 'center of my skin' etc. We released the song and we can't go back now."