Songfacts®:

• This song was originally recorded by Iron & Wine for their 2007 The Shepherd's Dog album. It finds Iron & Wine's Sam Beam singing of being trapped by an empty relationship:
  
  Have I found you? Flightless bird
  Jealous, weeping
  Or lost you? American mouth
  Big pill looming
  
  Beam bitterly looks on as his youthful dreams evaporate away.
• This was a key track used in the 2008 film Twilight, part of the Twilight Saga. It plays during a scene where Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) dance and talk alone at the prom. Uncut magazine asked Sam Beam how the song came to be used in the movie. He replied:
  
  "The story that I heard is that the album (The Shepherd's Dog) had just come out and Kristen Stewart was listening to it on her headphones when the filmmakers were blocking the prom scene. As the song Flightless Bird, American Mouth was working in her head, she suggested they use it to block the scene. So they did, intending on switching it later to something that other people might really want to hear. But you know how it is, you hear it too many times and it sticks - so that's what happened."
• An acoustic version of the song was also used in the 2011 The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 movie.