Songfacts®:

• English singer-songwriter Laura Marling opens her fourth album, Once I Was an Eagle, with this hesitant strum on which she tells her man, "Wouldn't ask you even to behave for me. I know there's no hope in Hell..."
• The song is the first of a four part salvo in which each track seamlessly flow into one another, much like "Don't Ask Me Why" and "Salinas" on Marling's previous album, A Creature I Don't Know. Its success, she told Radar magazine, was largely due to her producer, Ethan Johns, who had an instinctive grasp of the album's bigger picture. "I had written this 16-minute track that was quite definitively four different things," she said. "Ethan took notes as we ran through it; I'd give him instances of places where I wanted certain things, but he had this wide picture of the record that I didn't have. So when it came to the arrangements, he wanted it to feel like each of the instruments had this character to them. I didn't really realise that until the end of the process! Listening to it later, he had brought out things in the songs that I'd forgotten were in there."