Songfacts®:

• "'Money' is a polemical song, and it's me at my most cynical," Scottish singer-songwriter Hamish Hawk says of the third single to his 2023 Angel Numbers album. "It's a list of cheap shots and petty grievances I had banging around my head at the time of writing. Small talk, rat races and lengthy weddings all come under fire. It's really no surprise that it turns out I'm the stick in the mud. What's more, I'm interminably short on cash."
• Hawk told the Songfacts Podcast that this song is special to him because of the manner in which it was written.
  
  "It was one of the songs from the album that I wrote at home on the guitar, so it essentially started from a singer-songwriter kind of place. It's always nice when those songs come about because they feel spontaneous and natural and quite free. So, I have a closeness to 'Money' because of that, but also because it was written in one sitting," he said.
  
  "I went for a walk and the song wrote itself in its entirety - three verses. And I was excited to write it and to finish it because it introduced a lot of new imagery that I hadn't worked with before. It felt like a fresh batch of inspiration in a way because I wasn't treading over old ground."
• This opens with the memorable lyric, "Who buys a jacket from a gunmaker?" For Hawk, it's important to grab the listener right from the start, and it's hard for him to even start writing a song without a strong opening line in mind.
  
  "First lines are really important to me. I know when I've landed on 'the one.' There are different ways I write songs, but I know something is going well if it comes right out the gate with what I think is a strong opening lyric. I've gotten to the point now where I'd say it is a bare essential for my songs," he told Under The Radar.
  
  "When I've got that first lyric, that usually spurs me on. It's more difficult when I have something that's clearly meant to be in the middle of the song and no strong lyric at the beginning."
• The album was released two years after Hawk's breakthrough Heavy Elevator, which had reviewers commending it for capturing the quarantine zeitgeist. But that album was actually written long before the pandemic - it was actually Angel Numbers that was crafted during lockdown. Working remotely, Hawk and his collaborator/guitarist Andrew Pearson traded musical ideas from their respective locations and churned out a song a day. The practice helped Hawk tap into a creative flow that he'd never experienced before.
  
  "You're like the antenna and the signal comes in," he told Songfacts. "The information flows through you. It was a completely new landscape for me, and it was very exciting because where I had previously beaten myself up about lyrics - and to be fair, I still do - that period taught me to be slightly less critical, or at least to delay my critiques of my own work and just allow the work to form, and then later I could do something about it. But I was trying not to be an obstacle in my own path, and Angel Numbers is a product of that little moment."
• Hawk reunited with his Heavy Elevator producer Rod Jones at his Post Electric Studio in Edinburgh, Scotland, to record the album. The singer told Under The Radar about his collaboration with Jones, who is also the guitarist for the Scottish rock band Idlewild.
  
  "There's a real lightness of touch that he brings to the equation," he said. "He's really dedicated and you can tell he's utterly consumed by the project he's working on."