Six minutes of piano and strings that has been used to make people cry in films, television, adverts and figure skating routines for nearly twenty years. The band who recorded it feel trapped by it and the singer thinks his other songs are better.
Here is what the house in it represents, why the song keeps getting quieter as it grows, and what the tree is doing.
The Short Answer
Impermanence. The narrator describes a house built out of stone, with wooden floors and windowsills, a place where he does not feel alone, built for someone he loves. Then it comes apart. The song is not about having a home. It is about the fact that homes do not last, and neither do the people in them.
The Story Behind the Song
The Cinematic Orchestra are an English group formed in London in 1999 by Jason Swinscoe, working across jazz, electronic and orchestral music. The song appears on their third studio album, Ma Fleur, released on 7 May 2007 on Ninja Tune and Domino.
It is credited to Swinscoe, Phil France and the Canadian singer-songwriter Patrick Watson, who sings and plays piano on it. Swinscoe produced, and it was recorded at Chung King Studios in New York in 2006. It came out as the album’s second single on 29 October 2007.
What is the structure doing?
Building and then withdrawing, which mirrors the lyric exactly. It opens with a solitary piano figure and a voice. Strings arrive gradually. By the middle the arrangement is large, and it is at that point that the words start describing things being lost.
The song runs six minutes and eleven seconds and never raises its voice. There is no drum kit driving it and no chorus in the pop sense. What it has instead is accumulation, which is a more accurate way to describe how a life gets assembled.
What happens to the house?
It goes. The verses take you through the rooms, the doors, the windows and the dust on the furniture, and then the narrator is standing somewhere that used to be that place, holding the memory rather than the building.
That turn is the entire song. The word home in the title is a verb phrase, not a noun: it is about the act of building, which implies the thing being built can fall down.
What is the tree about?
The narrator describes climbing a tree in the garden to see out over the world and face the wind. It is the one moment of movement in a song otherwise made of rooms and objects.
Read one way it is a memory of childhood. Read another it is the same gesture as the house itself: putting something between yourself and the weather, then finding out how little protection it offers.
Why do the people who made it dislike it?
Because it swallowed everything else. Swinscoe has said he feels shackled to the song and regrets that it came to define the group, whose catalogue is largely instrumental and considerably stranger than this.
Watson has been similarly cool about it, indicating he considers other songs of his better. He has also turned down licensing money on ethical grounds, refusing at least one corporate request to use it.
Neither position is unreasonable. A six-minute chamber ballad that overshadows two decades of experimental work is a mixed blessing for the people who made the other work.
Why is it in everything?
Because it does a specific job better than almost anything else available. It is slow, wordless for long stretches, emotionally unambiguous and free of any particular era’s production tics, which makes it perfect for a montage.
It appeared in a Schweppes advertisement in 2008 that won awards, in the 2010 film The Tree, and in a long list of television dramas since. A shorter instrumental version of the same material, “That Home,” has had a parallel life in trailers.
The overuse is the price of the quality. A lot of people now associate it with a scene they cannot remember from a show they did not finish.
Is it a love song or a grief song?
It refuses to say. The lyric never names who the house was built for or what happened to them, and there is no death in it and no departure described.
Listeners have taken it as a relationship ending quietly, as somebody dying, as a parent watching children leave, and as a straightforward song about a childhood house. The song supports all of those because it withholds the one fact that would settle it.
Why it works
Because it never asks for the reaction it gets. Watson’s delivery is restrained to the point of understatement, the arrangement never swells at the obvious moment, and there is no line telling you how to feel.
Everything sad in it is structural. A man lists the ordinary features of a house with real fondness, and then the house is gone, and the piano keeps going. That is the whole mechanism, and nearly twenty years of film editors have not managed to wear it out.
Instrumental-leaning songs used in film are the hardest of all to identify, since there is barely a lyric to search; when a fragment is all you have, our song lyrics search is where to start.