Songfacts®:

• The title track of Noah and the Whale's fourth album features a guest vocal from Anna Calvi. The band first met the English/Italian singer-songwriter at a Glastonbury festival and found they were mutual fans.
• Vocalist Charlie Fink explained to The Independent that this song is "a melodramatic, angst-ridden story, about a kid wanting to break away from his family and be someone new."
• Fink co-wrote and directed a film also called Heart of Nowhere to accompany the album. The movie is a dystopian nightmare, when adolescents have been separated from society and quarantined in a ghetto until they are deemed safe enough to return. Fink told The Independent the flick is less about the future than today's concerns. "ET is about divorce, Let the Right One In is about young love," he said. "This film is a coming-of-age story about friendship and memory."
• Fink told NME that the song is a parallel to the 1973 South Dakota murder spree movie Badlands. He added: "I wanted the record to start that way, with a melodramatic story of breaking free. We were in a café in September and Baz Luhrmann's 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' came on and I hadn't heard it in a decade. There was one line which stood out, something like, 'Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who apply it. Advice is a form of nostalga, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past.' It was a very sweet lyric and I connected with it.
  
  "It's about accepting that you and your parents have this link," he continued, "whatever your relationship is, that you're their creation and that you are a product of them. I think a part of accepting yourself is accepting your family and where you're from."