Four Walls (The Ballad of Perry Smith) Lyrics

Lyric discussion by TishTash 

Cover art for Four Walls (The Ballad of Perry Smith) lyrics by Bastille

In interview, Dan Smith said

"I was really taken aback by 'In Cold Blood' by Truman Capote, when I read it a few years ago, and I guess the song just sort of came out of that.

It’s one of the older tunes on the record. Actually, the guitar solo at the end Will recorded on a tour bus in Germany maybe two years ago or more. Since then, Serial happened, and Making a Murderer and there’s this fresh advent of true crime in culture being like a massive deal, and I found that really interesting.

So we then put in, got a friend to put in a little quote at the end that says, “This is a collect call from the prison” just as a kind of nod to that, because I did think it was interesting that we had this song which is about the first wave of true crime fiction. I guess the song’s another super-happy Bastille song that looks at dark subjects. It very loosely looks at kind of capital punishment and how weird it is, and two wrongs don’t make a right and all that kind of stuff".

Song Fact