Songfacts®:

• "Wild Bird" is the lead single of The Coral's 11th studio album, Sea of Mirrors. Frontman James Skelly found inspiration after watching a documentary about Italian Westerns. He was captivated by their limitless creativity, particularly Ennio Morricone's iconic soundtracks, and imagined a surreal Western directed by Fellini.
  
  "I just liked that idea of sort of taking a genre and using it for whatever you want," Skelly mused to NME.
  
  This was one of the first songs Skelly wrote for Sea Of Mirrors once he figured out the album concept.
• In the 1970s, American country and pop singer Lee Hazlewood made Sweden his home for a decade. He collaborated with Swedish director Torbjörn Axelman, creating records, films, and the one-hour television show Cowboy in Sweden, which later became an album. It's that soundtrack which ignited the spark for "Wild Bird."
  
  "I loved just how wrong it was to have this European cowboy theme," said Skelly, "I just really liked that, it's so wrong it's so Coral. I can't think of anything more Coral than that."
• Sean O'Hagan of the Anglo-Irish band the High Llamas co-produced the song and arranged its sweeping strings.
  
  "Sometimes I think a lot of people's arrangements sound like padded strings in insurance adverts or something, like everyone did in the '90s," said Skelly. "But Sean is very original, what he does is not gonna sound like anyone else. He does this thing where he takes a genre of a sort of '60s type thing but it's so him. There's no one else like it."
• Skelly sings of chasing a gull to watch it "spread your wings in the raging sun and show the world you're free."
  
  O'Hagan marveled at Skelly's ability to conjure up songs out of nothing. "It's like he just looked up saw a seagull floating over the rooftops and instantly wrote a song about the freedoms we've all lost," he told Uncut magazine. "It's difficult to write a classic song that sounds like it's always been there and always been there, but he wrote it in 20 minutes."
• This isn't The Coral's first avian-themed song. "White Bird" is a similarly titled track they recorded for their 2016 album, Distance Inbetween.
• Sea of Mirrors landed at #3 on the UK albums chart. It was The Coral's sixth Top 5 album on the listing.