David Gray wrote this for the British film This Year's Love, a romantic comedy set in the Camden Town area of London. The director, David Kane, was a big David Gray fan and asked him to compose the song. Gray had never written on commission before, but he welcomed the challenge. (Also, he needed the money: he had been dropped by his label and was paying out of pocket to make his White Ladder album.) Gray had to use the title, but other than that, the song doesn't reflect the film. The lyric finds him with his back to the wall in a romantic sense, knowing that this year's love might be his last chance. He was writing in character - Gray had been married since 1993.
Gray wrote this song quickly in a fit of inspiration. He told Songfacts: "I took the words 'this year's love' and started to play with them as a sort of melody, and then within an hour or so I'd written this song right then quickly, and made a quick recording of it - quite a primitive recording - and I sent off to the director, my manager and various interested people just to see what they thought. And to my enormous surprise, they came back saying they really liked it. I had no idea that it had any kind of power really - I was just following my instincts."
Gray appears in the This Year's Love movie as a bar singer. His songs "Sail Away," "Monday Morning," "Crazy" and "Shine" also appear in the film.
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