Songfacts®:

• The theatrical and morbid opening track to John Grant's Love Is Magic album starts off with a litany of lurid headlines before morphing into a more personal section about the loss of his mother in 1995.
  
  "That was a tough one to do," Grant admitted to Uncut magazine. "I did feel a little bit upset when we were making it. But it felt so natural and comfortable to me. It's about the fear of facing the things you've been unable to deal with and distancing yourself throughout your life with the whole theater of the absurd, conspiracy theories, newspaper articles."
• The opening listing of trivia and terror was inspired by the English free newspaper The Metro, which Grant picked up on the London tube. His attention was grabbed by the headline "14-year-old rapes 80-year-old man."
  
  "You know, that comes into your life and into your brain, you know, in the middle of whatever else is happening, he told Billboard. "Everyday life is quite jarring, especially these days where you have so much information coming at you all the time, you really have to make a conscious decision to shut out a lot of that noise."
  
  "It's a very accurate description of what daily life is like for anybody because you never know all the things that are going to come, all the variables that are going to be involved in any given day," Grant added. "As you go through the day you're confronted with the narrative that's going on inside your head and the things that are actually happening around you and memories and people coming into your field of vision. You're always dealing with all these different timelines simultaneously and there's a lot of absurdity in that."
• Speaking to The Sun about the song's bipolar mix of newspaper captions and sad reflection of loss, Grant explained he's matching "a very natural snapshot of all the insanity" with the years he spent "not being able to grieve the death of my mother."
  
  "There's all this stuff going on, conspiracy theories, Trump... you're bombarded," he added. "When you get to bed at night, you don't realize what's really going on inside you. There's this emotional constipation caused by things you haven't been able to process. In my case, this particular human is talking about the death of someone, his mother, so it's a really key death."
• "Metamorphosis" begins as a surreal observation on the small print of life before suddenly transforming into a stark reflection on Grant's mother's death.
  
  "Think about what a cross section of a moment in a day is like," the singer told Q magazine. "It's like 6D because there are so many different variables going on. At least 4D. You can be standing in the grocery store and thinking about what it was like to watch your mother waste away to a skeleton and die. People say, 'Oh, that's dark!' To me, it's not. It's just life. It's not bad."
• John Grant's manager told him this song shouldn't be the first track on Love is Magic because it would put people off. But he ignored his advice. "I was told it was a mistake to start with it but I was like, 'How can it be a mistake? I love it and I made it,'" he told Mojo. "When you do something you love for your business, that's when it gets really tested."
  
  On reflection, Grant wishes he'd made "Tempest" the opening song "because that's one of my favorite things I've ever done. There's all sorts of little shout-outs to my sister on that track."