Songfacts®:

• The title track of Lisa O'Neill's fifth studio album, All Of This Is Chance, borrows its opening lines ("Clay is the word and clay is the flesh…") from "The Great Hunger," a 1943 epic poem by Patrick Kavanagh. The Irish poet's musings about country life and the long-term consequences of the famines that ravaged Ireland in the 1840s inspired O'Neill when she performed at a live adaptation of the work in 2020.
  
  "In Kavanagh's poem, he's writing about a man in his 40s", the Irish singer-songwriter explained in a 2023 interview with The Quietus, "and he's looking out onto his perfect fields and he's thinking, 'But is this it? My field is fertile, but what about I? What is this life? What is this existence?'"
  
  O'Neill comes up with her own answers on the album, which is a powerful mediation on our connection to nature. "I'm trying to say we're all connected to the bigger universe, we're connected to the apples in the trees and the stars in the sky," she said.
• O'Neill was particularly drawn to Kavanagh's ideas about art, which are reflected in his famous poem. "He has a line in it: Unless the clay is in the mouth, the singer's singing is useless," she said. "I think he may be suggesting that unless you've tasted what you're talking about, it's not going to resonate. When you're making art, everything comes through your experience, or from empathizing with something that really moved you. It might be someone else's story, but Jesus Christ it spoke to you - you felt it. I think your idea is worth more when you can universalize or magnify it."
• O'Neill told The Quietus why she chose the song/album title: "I'm trying to go right back to conception. Even that moment, everything that happens around it, means it may or may not have happened, you know? I like that idea. Yeah, I could have easily not have been born if my parents had had a different conversation that evening."
• O'Neill first visited America in 2011 when she was the opening act for British singer-songwriter David Gray on his Lost and Found tour. Gray was impressed by a video he'd seen of O'Neill singing on YouTube and reached out to the singer, who was working as a barista to pay the bills while writing songs in her spare time.
  
  "It really got me by surprise to get a call from David Gray and to find myself within that year leaving the job and doing an interview in the American Embassy for a visa to go play music in America with this wonderful band. It all happened so fast," she told Songfacts in 2023. "I was so green and so innocent. It wasn't like I had been to America on holiday or done a little gig here and there and I was at this level with David. It was straight from the café to the Grand Ole Opry in a sense."