Goodbye My Lover

This song is about a girl Blunt dated, but he wrote it years after the relationship ended. When he appeared on the UK show Songbook, Blunt explained: "I guess it's a realization that you'll never be with someone, but the frustration that they are still alive and out there in the world. It can be an incredibly painful idea - I sat with the song for quite a long time. But for me, it's probably my most personal song. Whereas 'You're Beautiful' is about a moment, one second in time of passing that person, the song 'Goodbye My Lover' is about a lifetime's worth of emotion, the fact that that relationship is over, and that life continues. And yeah, it's the most personal song on Back To Bedlam."

James Blunt lived with actress Carrie Fisher while he recorded Back To Bedlam; he met her through a family friend. In the Radio Times February 10, 2006, James Blunt described how he recorded this song in Carrie Fisher's bathroom: "For 'Goodbye My Lover,' we needed a piano. There wasn't one in the home studio we recorded in but Carrie had one in her bathroom. So I said, Let's get the home studio and spend the night in there. It was a good acoustic - that's why people sing in the shower. And it sounds great to me - that's what's on the album."

If you think the person Blunt is singing about in this song is dead, you're not the only one; Blunt says he gets asked that a lot. He says the girl he's singing about is very much alive, but the grieving in the song gives the impression of death.