Babylon

This song is about a guy whose girlfriend has left him. Once he realizes he has allowed fear to block his path to love, he decides he wants her back. David Gray, who was 30 years old when the album was released, was married at the time and was writing in character. In a Songfacts interview with Gray, he explained: "There's a feeling in that chorus of 'let go of your heart, let go of your head' that's striving. I'm trying to express something but I don't really know what it is, and as the years have gone by, in a way that's the central theme of the record: this act of surrender. 'Surrender at all costs,' if I may come up with a quote."

"Babylon" is a great word to sing and loaded with historical significance. The ancient Babylon was a major city in Mesopotamia located in what is now Iraq - the Hanging Gardens Of Babylon are one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But in the context of this song, it refers to London, which in Victorian times was considered the modern-day Babylon. "It's a London record, the whole of White Ladder is, and that's a London song," Gray told Songfacts. "So, rather than saying 'London,' I said 'Babylon.' It fitted basically, and often you have to say something because it just fits the song. And I was then panicked: What does Babylon even mean? I started looking it up in dictionaries and I even rang my father-in-law who was a very knowledgeable man, and he said, 'London was called Babylon. Yes Dave, don't worry, that's true.' And I said, 'Right, I'm going to go with this.' It was just something I did instinctively because I absorbed that piece of information. I panicked a bit afterward thinking, am I making a fool of myself, talking rubbish. You've got all those dub songs as well that reference Babylon - reggae and dub, it's in there a lot - and for the kind of decadent times we live in, I guess that's what I was saying."

The guy in the song goes through a weekend, with each day - Friday, Saturday and Sunday - introducing a new verse. This is what Gray calls a "mathematical" approach to songwriting (Billy Joel did it on "You May Be Right"), but it's done with a great depth of feeling. "I've come to reflect on that song and realize there's something that resides in it that has a sort of confessional power, so I'm speaking to myself while addressing the listener," he said in his Songfacts interview. "What other way is there to live but to surrender? Do we really believe in reason? You've got to let go, there's something much bigger. So I've come to appreciate that it has a depth of feeling even though the slightly mathematical songwriting approach I took perhaps belies that. The beauty is in the music of words themselves, the balance of sibilance and weight, and the onomatopoeic phrasing, the things that just ring, the words that just feel right in the lines, and 'Babylon' really has that. The lyric dances over the melody, and it has this wonderful feeling of two things intertwining very, very naturally, like the tendrils of a vine creeping up a fence. It had this sense of entanglement and entwining that felt very lovely and very natural when I wrote it. But that song was written in stages - it didn't all deliver itself in one go. I had to unpick the puzzle of the chorus, which took quite some time."