Lost Horse

Asaf Avidan really did lose a horse, which led to the tsunami of emotions he put into this song. It sounds like a lucid dream, but according to Avidan, a pack of wolves chased his horse off a cliff. He spent four days looking for the body, but never found it. "Suddenly I gave that up," he explained on the Songfacts Podcast. "I sat down and wrote the words 'lost horse' on a piece of paper, and just bawled. It was obvious that I wasn't weeping just over my horse, but rather about the idea of loss, how entropy always wins - the second law of thermodynamics. So every version of myself that I dreamed to have was lost, every relationship and every friend. I began writing the song in that mood and I wrote about this love that I just lost, this relationship. The title is very specific about my lost horse and the verses are very specific about a relationship that I had, but the chorus needed to be something more than that, so 'what we are is sundials for the gods,' meaning we are these decaying bodily things for the gods to have some point of reference for how time passes, because the gods don't age or die. So we live this trench of a life as just examples of entropy like everything else in the universe."

Avidan was once an animator, which explains the vivid images that come into his head and appear in his lyrics. He's very descriptive, describing his feeling as a "prolonged, insane, grotesque thing." The song's title doesn't show up in the lyric at all.

If you heard this song and thought Avidan was a black woman, you're not alone. He's actually a man of Israeli descent, but his voice is very unusual. Avidan is best known for "Reckoning Song," his 2008 track that became a huge hit across Europe in 2012 when it got a techno remix by the German DJ Wankelmut.