Songfacts®:

• This is a track from English electro outfit Hot Chip's fourth studio album, One Life Stand. Vocalist Joe Goddard told Billboard magazine that the record came together pretty easily as 2009 provided a lengthy time away from touring duties. The group used the gap in their schedules to experiment with writing and trying out new things, such as utilizing acoustic instruments. However, this song proved to be the most problematic track. He explained: "We tried to have a simplicity to this record. The most difficult song was 'Hand Me Down Your Love.' It was just a matter of months and months of adding synthesizers, adding drum parts. There were sections where we thought were unnecessary, so we removed it. It got to something like 160 tracks or pieces of music. I think because we had more time to make this record, we tried things out differently. The time was a little bit unhelpful. In the end, we didn't use a lot of parts we recorded."
• Joe Goddard (vocals, synthesizer and percussion) told the story of this song to The NME February 6, 2010: "(Co-vocalist) Alexis Taylor had a dream where I'd written a new song called 'Hand Me Down Your Love.' When he woke up he wrote it. That's happened for a couple of songs. It's great, 'cos you don't have to do any work, your unconscious brain just gives it to you."
• This features the drumming of Charles Hayward from 1970s prog-rockers This Heat. Felix Martin (synthesizer and drum machine) told The NME: "Charles Haywood plays drums on that. He's a great character, he was involved in recording a lot of the tracks. He's a real English eccentric and a well-respected veteran of London's experimental music scene. He's been in bands like This Heat, and we went on for ages about how much he loves Abba."
• Taylor added to The Yorkshire Evening Post about Haywood's contribution: "Working with people like that you immediately get some stuff which you don't expect. Musicians of that calibre are capable of doing anything, really. Charles Hayward comes from an improvisatory background, he's very capable of coming up with his own stuff. At the end of 'Hand Me Down Your Love' the final chorus is a cappella with his drumming in the background. There you'd expect the drummer to be doing cymbal fills but there's this explosive sound with his kit. It works tremendously well. It's something we would not have come up with ourselves."