Songfacts®:

• In this cover of the song by sigur rós, W.A.S. recorded the song entirely from phonics. "Hoppipolla" is written in Icelandic, and lead singer Keith Murray couldn't perform it again, even if he had the hankering; he doesn't speak the language.
  
  It was a serendipitous event that brought this song to life for We Are Scientists in a bar in a London hotel. Keith says, "Somehow there was an Icelandic woman in the group we were hanging out with. So she wrote down the lyrics to it and then we took a look at this and we're like, 'Uh, that's not gonna work.' And then we all got together and wrote them down phonetically with her. She told us what he was saying, but I couldn't tell you what any one word meant. I was just singing the phonetics of it. We get asked to do it a lot live, and there's no way I would ever be able to sing that song live. I have zero recollection of what the words are."
• Sigur rós hail from Iceland, and "rightly claim to bring you the beautiful landscape of their homeland with their music," their Web site trumpets. If this song is any indication, their media is correct. Still, the W.A.S. version of the song has a slightly more haunting quality. They did it justice, even if they had no clue what the words meant. "There are a bunch of sigur rós songs that are just in their own invented language," claims Keith Murray. "But this is one of the few songs that's actually in a real language. This one is actually in Icelandic." (read the full interview with Keith Murray)