Songfacts®:

• Southern California five-piece Young the Giant are an indie rock band formed by high school friends in 2004. The group comprises vocalist Sameer Gadhia, guitarist Jacob Tilley, guitarist and backing vocalist Eric Cannata, bassist Payam Doostzadeh and drummer François Comtois. They were signed by Roadrunner Records in 2009, who released digitally Young the Giant's eponymous debut album in October 2010. The CD received a physical release on January 25, 2011.
• The band's name is purposefully nonsensical; Gadhia explained it as a "leftfield idea" meant to evoke curiosity.
• This is the band's debut single. The song evokes a tension between being both liberated and being held back. During an interview with The Delete Bin, Vancouver music blogger Rob Jones asked Cannata where the tension came from. He explained: "The dynamic between tension and liberation came from the very basic literal interpretation of the struggle we experienced directly before the creation of the song. It was a stroke of inspiration, and later appreciated insight, that cut through a relatively frustrating time for us as writers. As mutual writers, it can be both smooth and rough to create songs together, and it all depends on the daily dynamic."
• Cannata told the story of the song to The Delete Bin: "The specific day of 'My Body''s creation was one of those rougher days for us. We had opened sail on a relatively stale wind, and had caught on to a mellower vein of overly contemplated writing. In a bout of frustration, we just decided to try something absolutely different; something based on instinct and spontaneity rather than meditation and patience. The song started just as a quirky joke; a release of tension. The riff, melody, and lyrics formed in a matter of ten minutes. At the end of the album writing process, 'My Body' stayed the most pure to its raw, original, form."