Lay My Head Down

Album: Despite Our Differences (2006)
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Songfacts®:

  • Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls wrote this song. She explains that it's not based on a specific event: "it's sort of a metaphor for what we can experience socially and how it can wear us down, and there's so much stimuli and we're so attached to our past or whatever it is that's holding us down. That song kind of has a world-weariness about it, definitely. More so than any song I've ever written. Sometimes if you go to a party and you look around and you see posing, or people professing this or that... if you take a look at the whole thing, it just can sort of be overwhelming, what human begins are going though. And there's always a party, it's like if people are drinking and there's like a buzz in the air, and things are heightened. It was just sort of a metaphor for how life can become like that, and become tiresome because of our patterns and our complexities - you want that one person that you trust implicitly that you can just put your head on his or her shoulder, and feel okay in all the madness." (Check out our interview with Emily Saliers. The official Indigo Girls website is indigogirls.com.)

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