Songfacts®:

• Frontman and songwriter Conor O'Brien told The Daily Telegraph that this atheist anthem started out "pretty mental, drum and bass electronica, lyrics about cities crumbling and people dying, sounds of fire and apocalyptic thing."
  
  After rehearsing the song with his band, it gradually transformed into "a pretty straightforward folk rock song about smiling into the void."
• O'Brien described this song to The Sun, as a "tragi-comedy." adding he "was very much influenced by Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - that feeling of deep, dark moments being placed alongside compulsive hilarity."
  
  Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - 2007) was a 20th-century American writer known for his humanist beliefs and satirical novels. Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), which is generally recognized as Vonnegut's most influential and popular work, drew on his experience as a World War II prisoner of war in Germany when he witnessed the destructive bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut was one of a group to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. His satirical novel has inspired a number of other songs. They include:
  
  "Everything Is Automatic" by Matthew Good. (The lyric, "Those birds are singing" was taken from a line in the book).
  
  "And So It Goes" by Billy Joel and "So It Goes" by Nick Lowe. (Both song titles taken from a recurring line in the book used every time a death occurs).
  
  Also, the English alternative rock band Billy Pilgrim took their name from the novel's soldier protagonist, and the title of Moby's 2017 album Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt is a reference to Billy Pilgrim's epitaph.
• Regarding the song's meaning, O'Brien told The Sun it, "is a sort of ode to meaninglessness, that absolute void that we all feel at some stage in our lives, if not every single day. It sort of proposes that this void is the very thing that binds us all together as human beings on this planet."
• This was the only song on (Awayland) that was written by O'Brien in one session. He explained to WhiteTapes: "I literally woke up and it was in my head. Like a Paul McCartney moment. This never happened to me before or after. I just sang it to my computer and recorded so that was a quick song. The others were very long and slow and just, really teasing."