Courtship

Album: Utopia (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Here, Bjork dissects the emotional aftereffects of online dating.

    He turned me down.
    I then downturned another, who then downturned her


    Bjork jokingly said in her initial statement about the record that Utopia would be "like [my] Tinder album."
  • Flute melodies arranged by Bjork form the backbone of the track. Björk formed a twelve piece Icelandic female flute orchestra named Föstudagur for the Utopia album, which she arranged for and conducted. The flautists would meet in her Icelandic cabin studio on Fridays (föstudagur means Friday), where they rehearsed for something like 50 or 60 days.
  • Bjork studied flute as a child. Pitchfork asked the Icelandic songstress what drew her back to that sound. She replied:

    "It was a gradual thing that became obvious. As a kid, I had a complicated relationship with the flute. It wasn't my first choice. I was always moving away from it and doing everything except flute. So maybe enough time has passed that I can actually go back and rediscover it. And after all the gravity of the last album, it feels so light and floaty. It's like sitting in the clouds.

    We started collecting mythological stories from around the world, from South America and Africa and all over, and I read all these books about utopia. I was trying to see: Why am I obsessed with flutes right now? Where is it personal and where is it universal? So it was really satisfying to discover that a lot of the stories were about women in the tribe stealing the flutes. They escaped with the children and went to a utopian place. Sometimes they got found out and something terrible happened, like violence. But in some stories, they managed to create a world where there was no violence or war. I was really excited by that. I also think people who end up being flute players are such interesting characters. They're always eccentric."

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