Is George Ezra’s 2022 hit top of the “Funeral Hit Parade”?

Green Green Grass” stems from a trip George Ezra took to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia with a couple of close friends at Christmas 2018. As they sat at a beach bar, drinking homemade rum punch and Piton (the local lager), loud music kicked in three streets back from the sea.

Half an hour later, Ezra went to check out the source of the music. He discovered a street party with three different sound systems and people cooking and dancing. He asked a girl working in a shop what was going on and she told him it was a funeral day, celebrating three lives in their community that they’d lost. The experience stopped Ezra in his tracks as it was totally different to how people approach the end of life back home in England.

She said
Green, green grass
Blue, blue sky
You better throw a party on the day that I die

Ezra debuted “Green Green Grass” live on April 12, 2022 at a show at the London Palladium. He released the song 10 days later as the second single from his third album, Gold Rush Kid.

Prior to the pandemic, Ezra relied on jotting down his experiences in a diary for inspiration for his songs. When COVID-19 struck, the singer feared that stuck in lockdown he wouldn’t have material for his third album. “We played our last show of our last record in London at the Royal Albert Hall,” he told the audience at the London Palladium. “After that I had this whole adventure booked – I’m sure we all did for 2020 – but we couldn’t do our plans. For me – writing – I was like ‘Oh shoot, that’s your whole schtick. That is what you do. Now you can’t do it.'”

The solution came through scouring through old journals. While flicking through one of them, Ezra found a note he’d written the night he got home from his Saint Lucia vacation that read, “Green, green grass, blue, blue sky. You better throw a party in the day that I die.”

George Ezra wrote the song with the track’s producers Joel Pott and Stuart Price. Former Athlete frontman Joel Pott is Ezra’s regular writing partner. English producer Stuart Price has also worked with Madonna, The Killers, and Dua Lipa.