Laura

The lead single from Bat for Lashes (Natasha Khan)'s third studio album, The Haunted Man, is a piano and cello-driven imploration to a forlorn friend offering her the strength to fight the battles she is facing. "You're the train that crashed my heart. You're the glitter in the dark. Oh, Laura, you're more than a superstar," sings Khan. The song received its radio debut on July 22, 2012 on Zane Lowe's BBC Radio 1 show and was made available as an instant download to people who pre-ordered the album on iTunes.

Khan composed the song with Justin Parker, the co-writer of Lana del Rey's "Video Games." She told Mojo magazine: "I'd written all the other songs for the album, but the label were giving me a tough time about there not being any singles. I didn't want to go down the obvious pop route and I noticed there were no piano ballads this time - mainly because I'd bored myself to death doing dark, subversive piano songs. I'd heard the Lana Del Rey stuff and noticed the quality of the writing, and I've always liked '70s singer-songwriter things, so I decided to ask Justin to help me write something that was more of a conventional ballad. We worked on chord structures and other elements, winding our way around each other until we had a really strong piece of song writing."

So what inspired Khan's lyrics about her forlorn friend? The night before Khan was due to meet up with Justin Parker, she threw a "debauched" party at her London flat, which left a close friend (not actually called Laura) broken the next day. Khan recalled to Q magazine: "We huddled in bed together and she was having morning-after horrors."