Songfacts®:

• "First You Jump" has the carpe diem vibe of earlier Simple Minds songs like "Alive And Kicking" and "Sanctify Yourself":
  
  First you jump
  Then get wings
  
  "That's a classic Simple Minds song: slide guitar, pumping bass, big chorus," the band's frontman Jim Kerr said in a "making of" video. "There's positivity in that song."
• Simple Minds bass player Ged Grimes wrote this song and brought it to their main songwriters, Jim Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill, early in the sessions for the album Direction Of The Heart, which had to be pieced together in sections because of the pandemic. The song has a Celtic influence that Kerr and Burchill love; they reworked it a bit and released it as the second single from the album, following "Vision Thing."
• Simple Minds released their first album in 1979. They had their biggest hits in the '80s but managed to reinvent themselves over the next few decades to stay musically relevant with a constant progression. Along the way, they went through lots of lineup changes, but Kerr and Burchill remained constant.
  
  "I think the key word is 'energy,'" Kerr said of this song and how it related to their longevity. "Never feeling that you've achieved everything. You've always got somewhere else to go. The band would be going for 42 years if we hadn't recognized that change is good. Change is the secret to the future, really, and you have to embrace that change."
• The band shot the video in the Ancient theatre of Taormina in Sicily before performing a concert there on July 12, 2022. Much of the album was recorded in Sicily, where Kerr and Burchill live.