Origins

The original Tennis duo of Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley decided to expand their core surf pop sound for their sophomore album, Young & Old, by adding drummer James Barone to the band full-time and enlisting Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney to produce the set.

This was the first song written for the record. Moore found inspiration for it in a poem by William Butler Yeats, A Woman Young and Old in which a woman reflects on a lifetime's worth of memories. After hearing Riley's music for the song, she began to think of personal issues involved in being in a band such as dealing with critics and relationships. "I thought about how the suddenness of becoming a band and spending so much time on the road with others seemed to bring out the best and the worst in me. I thought a lot about human nature – mine, really, and the way it had been portrayed to me in my childhood," she told Rolling Stone. "I felt frustrated with the self-defeating conception of humanity I was presented with."
"I wouldn't have written a line of ["Origins"] if it hadn't been for Yeats," Moore added.