Album: Hopeless Romantic (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Michelle Branch married her bass player, Teddy Landau, in Mexico on May 23, 2004 and gave birth to a girl named Owen the following year. The singer filed for divorce in February 2015, after ten years of marriage. She sings about the end of their relationship during this song. Branch told MTV News:

    "'City' is the song that closes out the album, and it was one of the first songs I wrote for the record. It was a lightbulb moment about needing to find the courage to leave my marriage. It was much longer initially when I wrote it - there were three other verses, and it felt too honest to put [on the record] initially. Now that I've had space and [the marriage] ended so amicably, I was able to put the song on my album. It was healing to have that out."
  • Michelle Branch wrote the song back in 2012, but it turned out to be eerily prescient. "I was nearing my 30th birthday and I thought, 'Something needs to change in my life,' she said. "I felt stagnant in this weird holding pattern, but I never acknowledged it to myself until I wrote that song. A lot of huge things happened to me really young. I got signed at 17 and released my first album a month after I turned 18. I met my ex-husband when I was 19, got married at 20, and had a baby at 21."

    "'City' was a song about me realizing that I wanted to make a change," Branch added. "It was one of the first things I wrote that felt really honest and it was kind of an 'A-ha' moment for me. Once I sang it, I thought, 'Oh, here we go.'"

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