When asked about the song's meaning, James Blunt told I Like Music in 2005: "'Wisemen' is about escaping from society's pressure to conform, and going off to do your own thing, taking your vices with you." Blunt wrote the track with London-based songwriters Jimmy Hogarth and Sacha Skarbek, who also teamed up to co-write the previous single, "Goodbye My Lover."
Two music videos were made. The first, directed by Mark Davis, finds Blunt and his band performing at the Cafe de Paris, where the singer is captivated by a woman in a green dress, then kidnapped by three masked men. In the second clip, directed by Paul Minor, Blunt drives to a forest (the same location as the "High" video) and burns his passport and other identifying papers. As they go up in flames, so does he. According to the Making Of video, the car Blunt drives is a 1971 Jensen FF.
Blunt sings of three wise men who've "got a semi by the sea." What exactly is a semi by the sea? It's a semi-detached house. In the Davis video specifically, it's a semi-detached shack made out of scraps of wood. James ends up trapped in this shack with three exaggerations of himself.
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