Songfacts®:

• Damon Albarn owns an isolated farmhouse in South Devon. The Blur and Gorillaz singer explained in Uncut magazine that he recorded this song into his phone while sitting on a nearby beach, "watching this cormorant, who comes at about 4:30 every day when the seas calm enough to do a bit of fishing."
  
  "Sometimes," he added, "it's accompanied by a couple of seals."
• For years, Albarn was scared of swimming into the bay. He reflects on those fears during the first few lines of this song.
  
  Am I imprisoned on this island?
  I have tried, I have tried to swim away
  Out to the buoy
  Ebony rose
  But the current's too strong
  
  Albarn conquered that fear at the beginning of lockdown and started swimming daily. "Sometimes I got myself in quite a lot of trouble because it was too rough," he told Apple Music. "I did have one point where I thought, 'I'm going to drown.' But I love doing it, because although the fear of being devoured by a shark or whatever has diminished, it's still there a little bit, so it's quite an edgy thing to do every day."
• Albarn wrote the song with Simon Tong, his bandmate in the Good, the Bad & the Queen.
• Albarn recorded "The Cormorant" for The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows. The album began life in 2019 as an orchestral piece, inspired by the landscapes of Iceland, but, as COVID-19 kicked in, the project underwent an enforced shift. Denied the chance to record with a full orchestra because of the pandemic, Albarn finished the record in Devon, where it morphed into 11 songs that "further explore themes of fragility, loss, emergence and rebirth." The title is taken from a John Clare poem titled "Love and Memory."
• Albarn plays bass guitar, Wurlitzer and piano on the track. The other musicians are:
  
  Violin: André de Ridder
  Viola: Alexina Hawkins
  Trombone: Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Jónsdóttir
  French Horn: Romain Bly and Rakel Björn Helgadóttir
  Electric Guitar: Simon Tong