Wherever You Go

Album: We Will Always Love You (2020)
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Songfacts®:

  • This slice of expansive cosmic dub features co-production from Jamie XX and guest vocals from Neneh Cherry and Sydney-based producer and singer Clypso. The song is a poignant anthem that, according to The Avalanches, celebrates the power that music and love can have in the face of, "the whole damn world incinerating."
  • The song starts off with the voice of Kurt Waldheim, the fourth secretary-general of the United Nations, who served from 1972 to 1981. His speech was recorded in 1977 for the Voyager Golden Record, an album traveling through interstellar space on NASA's Voyager spacecraft for alien life forms to find.

    "We spent a lot of time talking to Ann Druyan, who compiled it with her husband Carl Sagan. They fell in love while they were making it," Avalanches' Tony Di Blasi told Q Magazine. "They included a recording of a human heart beat as part of it and that's Ann the day before Carl asked her to marry him. This recording of a young woman in love is floating out there in the cosmos forever. I just love that."
  • "Why do we send music to the stars?" the Avalanches accompanying statement asks. "Is it because we want our voices to live forever? How else should we become pure spirits, singing forever in the dark?"

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