Songfacts®:

• "Body Moves" is a meditation on the sheer weirdness of having a body, the way it bumbles through life sometimes betraying you, sometimes guiding you, and frequently doing both at the same time.
  
  "The body fools you, the body moves you," Lindeman, the force behind The Weather Station, said. "Sometimes in directions that seem completely self-destructive, painful, or just plain bizarre."
  
  Which, frankly, is a very eloquent way of describing the universal experience of waking up with a stiff neck because you slept funny. Bodies are, after all, just a mess of chemicals, instincts, and impulses. They shut down when you need them to function and spring to life when you'd really rather be unconscious. The challenge, Lindeman suggests, isn't so much taming the body as learning to interpret its erratic signals.
• Musically, "Body Moves" takes a jazz-inflected, slow-burning approach, swirling together soft rhythms, warm instrumentation, and the faintest hint of danceable groove. It was a surprisingly tricky song to nail down in the studio, largely because nobody could quite agree on what it was supposed to be. "Everybody kept hearing the song as this 6/8 R&B slow jam," bassist Ben Whitely told Uncut magazine, "And she's like, 'No, this isn't right!'"
• The music video, co-directed by Lindeman and Philipe Léonard, is full of existential pondering. Lindeman describes it as a visual representation of the "two hemispheres of the mind" - one side confident and purposeful, the other dreamlike and adrift. Somewhere in the middle stands the actual self, bewildered, attempting to coordinate all the conflicting forces. The choreography reflects this dynamic, with limbs that occasionally seem to be moving entirely of their own accord, something anyone who has ever tripped over their own feet can relate to.
• "Body Moves" appears on The Weather Station's seventh album, Humankind, serving as a kind of philosophical waypoint between earlier tracks like "Neon Signs," which explores alienation, and the closing song, "Sewing," which stitches together the emotional themes of the album into a final, reflective whole. It's a record about disconnection and reconnection, and "Body Moves" lands squarely in the middle - right at that uncomfortable, fascinating moment when you realize your body and your mind are not always on speaking terms.