Civil War

Album: The Good Parts (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • This was one of the easiest songs that Andy Grammer has ever written. He told Billboard:

    "I'd already written a song that day, after writing on the bus, I went up to the hotel and laid down - and this idea just started tapping on my head. I think I might have actually said it out loud, like, 'I don't want to! I've already done it today.' And it just wouldn't leave, so I just like sat on my bed and wrote a song in - it probably took me about 40 minutes. It's such a sweet, sweet song. That doesn't happen very often."
  • Andy Grammer is a member of the Bahá'í Faith, which sees God as a single, personal, inaccessible, omnipresent creator of all things in the universe. Here, he questions the Almighty as to why humans can't stop doing bad.

    Why you put good into my heart
    Then tease me with evil since the day I was born?
    Guilty and confused, I ripped myself apart
    When you always knew I'd be a civil war


    He explained: "That one to me is a really sweet kind of argument with God about, 'You created me, and if you knew while you were creating me that I was gonna be a civil war between being a good person and having bad tendencies, why? Why did you have to make me that way?' And it's such a sweet, simple idea."

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