To Be Given A Body

Album: Three Futures (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • Torres closes her Three Futures album with this celebration of childhood and family. "This one started hymn-like, but evolved into something more like a southern gothic Gregorian chant for the apocalypse," she told NPR. "I wrote this song last, as it was the one I was avoiding writing the most, and recorded it in one take."
  • There an awareness, as Torres recounts the stories from her childhood, that those moments have gone and will never come back again. "Life itself is impermanent. I think that's one thing I didn't know as a kid," the singer told American Songwriter. "Getting older doesn't mean that you get to keep the people and the experiences you love. You don't get to keep anything. That's the gist of it. We don't get to keep anything. We don't even get to keep our own bodies in the end."
  • The song features an original melody that Torres' mother Cindy sang to her as a child.

    "When I was a kid, she would sing me this lullaby that I always thought belonged to somebody else or was something she'd learned somewhere," she said. "I didn't find out until pretty recently - when I recorded the album - that she had actually come up with that melody. So, I asked her if I gave her a writing credit if I could hum it on my new album. She gave me her blessing, so that's really dear to me."

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