Songfacts®:

• David Keenan told Songfacts the story behind this song, which appears on his debut album, A Beginner's Guide To Bravery. "The song 'Origin Of The World' centers around Gustave Courbet's painting of the same name and a story from Greek Mythology where this fella Actaeon is out hunting with his hounds and he spies the goddess Diana bathing in a sacred pond," he said. "She turns him into a stag with a splash of the water and his own hounds eat him alive. It embodies a sense of wonderment and exploration, the ideal and the metaphor of love being a risky enterprise where one could be consumed by loss at any time if the heart is confiscated and discarded by the other. Wish me luck, I'm in trouble again. It's the element of danger that draws us back to the source. The hunt before the kill, as the saying goes."