Earth Intruders

Earth Intruders
The song "Earth Intruders," in particular, was sculpted soon after Björk awoke from a dream she had during a cross-Atlantic flight to New York. In the dream, the singer said a "tsunami of millions and millions of poverty-stricken people" swelled high above the airplane she was a passenger on. Eventually, the wave overtook the plane, hit land and razed the White House into oblivion. "It’s a quite chaotic song," she said of Volta’s first single. "Lyrically, it’s a collection of all of these images" burned into her memory, from her trip to Indonesia as well as her vivid, in-flight reverie.

mtv.com, Mar 14 2007

Earth Intruders
I flew straight from [Indonesia] to New York and met with Timbaland, who got a private jet or something and met me in the studio, .So it was like two extreme kinds of worlds. And I’m not criticizing him, I mean, good for him, I can understand it’s a totally different context...it’s really hard to put into words. Earth Intruders’ was the first beat he [Timbaland] put on, and it just all came up, that sort of fantasy that maybe a tsunami of people would just come and hit the White House and scrape it off the ground and do some justice and spread these people all around the planet... I could see all these people in Indonesia that lost everything just kind of coming up, and everybody in Africa— because they were asking me to go there and fight, to be one of the people to address AIDS— just...

pitchforkmedia, 03-26-07

Earth Intruders
Was "Earth Intruders" fun to record ? Yeah it was, it was actually the first track me and Timbaland did together. The way we worked was very quick. He would just throw beats, and he’s got this guy that works with him called Nate, and he would just do basslines or whatever, it was very very immediate. One minute later I’m singing a melody on top of it, and three hours later we had full songs. It was very quick. That particular track is probably about me coincidentally being in Indonesia just before that. I had been invited by Unicef to visit the areas hit hardest by the tsunami. I was there for a few days, and I just sucked it all up, I couldn’t even react to it, it was just too much. And then I had to take several airplanes and go to New York, and in a fit of jet lag, trying to sleep...

XFM interview, April 2007

Earth Intruders
It just came like a tsunami out of my mouth, and lyrically it’s probably the most chaotic song that I’ve ever written, it sort of doesn’t make sense.I tried to edit it afterwards to fix it and make logic out of it, but it’s just like chaos.

The Guardian, April 27 2007

the video for Earth Intruders
I guess for this one I felt a bit sensitive about "Earth Intruders." Part of the imagery coming from the tsunami and Indonesia, part of it the dream and people with aids in Africa, and part of it ending up working with Timbaland. And me being an Icelandic person whose totally looking at things form the outside a lot of the time. Like how Timbaland flew to the recording session in a private jet. But just 200 years ago probably his ancestors were slaves, and good for him, he should be flying in private jets. You know, I’m not criticizing that for one second. Seeing black people in the US finally getting a little bit of respect for what they do. Like they’ve won three oscars or something, I can’t remember what it is. So that song is a little bit about that, and wanting to balance that power...

XFM Interview, April 2007