Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance is the ninth studio album by Scottish indie pop band Belle and Sebastian, released on 19 January 2015. The album was recorded in Atlanta, Georgia in 2014 and was Belle & Sebastian’s first record to be produced by Ben H. Allen III. It was their first record to be distributed worldwide by Matador Records.

I like this CD, and this song has lovely lyrics.  They are dream-like, almost as if an out-of-body experience.

Please note:  Belle and Sebastian are on tour in the US right now!   I saw it attached to one of the youtubes.

from songfacts.com  regarding today’s song, “Nobody’s Empire”
Whilst at university at the end of the 1980s, Belle & Sebastian frontman Stuart Murdoch became ill with ME (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome), and was unable to work for seven years. A relapse led him to write this autobiographical song for Belle and Sebastian’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance album. “There’s a year of my life bottled into every line,” Murdoch told The Guardian. “When I wrote it I was fighting the same demons. I wrote the song to cheer myself up.” “I wanted to write my own ‘glorious’, in inverted commas, history,” he added. “I want to walk out of this room and be a normal person. I want to go on tour with the band. All of this is a day-to-day battle so it was absolutely real for me, writing that song.”

The song’s music video features Tamzin Merchant lip-synching Murdoch’s lyrics. You might recognise the British actress from he roles as Georgiana Darcy in the 2005 film Pride & Prejudice and as the doomed Katherine Howard in The Tudors.

Murdoch is a practicing Christian. He found a personal faith when at his lowest ebb two years after becoming ill with ME, he started playing the piano. The resulting discovery of a spiritual awareness is chronicled on this song. “Everything else material had dropped away – friends, work, university; there was nothing,” he told The Independent. “And I just realized there was more to life than what we see around us, and that happened while sitting at the piano; I just felt this sense of eternity or something. Not to be too naff about it, but a sense of a life beyond this.”

Lying on my bed, I was reading French
With the light too bright for my senses
From this hiding place life was way too much
It was loud and rough round the edges

So I faced the wall when an old man called
Out of dreams that I would die there
But a sight unseen, you were pulling strings
You had a different idea

I was like a child, I was light as straw
And my father lifted me up there
Took me to a place where they checked my body
My soul was floating in thin air

I clung to the bed and I clung to the past
I clung to the welcome darkness
But at the end of the night there’s a green green light
It’s the quiet before the madness

There was a girl that sang like the chime of a bell
And she put out her arm, she touched me when I was in hell
When I was in hell

Someone sang a song and I sang along
Cause I knew the words from my childhood
Intellect, ambition they fell away
And they locked me up for my own good

But I didn’t mind, cause the silence was kind
It spoke to me in whispers
There was the sound of the wind and the cold cold dawn
And the quiet hum of business

Let me dangle awhile in this waiting room
I don’t need to go, I don’t need to know what you’re doing
Know what you’re doing

Lying on my side you were half awake
And your face was tired and crumpled
If I had a camera I’d snap you now
Cause there’s beauty in every stumble

We are out of practice we’re out of sight
On the edge of nobody’s empire
And if we live by the books and we live by hope
Does that make us targets for gunfire?

Now I look at you, you’re a mother of two
You’re a quiet revolution
Marching with the crowd, singing dirty and loud
For the people’s emancipation

Did I do okay, did I pave the way?
Was I strong when you were wanting?
I was tied to the yoke with a decent bloke
Who was stern but never daunting

And he told me to push and he made me feel well
He told to me to leave that vision of hell to the dying
Oh to the dying
Written by Belle & Sebastian.