Lilies

Bat For Lashes (Natasha Khan) opens her third album, The Haunted Man, with this song in which she's thinking about her grandmother during the Second World War. She told NME that with this record, "I really wanted to go back in time and write songs about experiences that my grandmother might've had when my grandfather was away at war, or that my mum might've had with my dad… There's a lot of healing and putting things to rest; just being kind to the people who've done wrong because they've been unconscious what they're doing."

We hear Khan singing ecstatically, "Thank God I'm alive," on this song's refrain. She explained to Mojo: "Lilies is about letting go - it's very pro-life. I get very emotional singing the, 'Thank God I'm alive 'bit, although other people have told me it's quite uncomfortable to listen to something quite so ecstatic and open-chested."

Khan penned this song one night on her couch after watching the 1970 film Ryan's Daughter. The movie tells the story of a young Irish woman who is bored with her marriage and has an affair with an English soldier. The singer readily related to the woman's feeling of emptiness. "There's a scene where the female character is going out at night to meet this soldier," Khan recalled to Pitchfork: "It's dusk, there are all these lilies, and you can see how heady and fragrant the air is. All the pollen is blowing on her skirt, and she's looking at this man - it's so sensual and exciting. She's been so deathly bored and trapped in her own existence. That's exactly how I felt."