Bassist Bob Hardy shows that he isn’t afraid of utilizing the ‘dusty end’ of the fretboard, frequently playing in the same register as the guitars. The bass and guitar both have independent parts that move in different directions, creating a series of different harmonic intervals as the intro progresses. The song’s intro actually shows an interesting musical device that seldom appears in commercial rock and pop songs – counterpoint. The lead single from the album and perhaps the band’s best-known track, ‘Take Me Out’ was Franz Ferdinand’s international breakthrough hit, combining punchy guitar hooks and a shout-along chorus with influences taken from dance music. (If any readers can think of a genuinely excellent band name then PLEASE email and I will arrange a suitable prize).Īnyway, enough of my personal grievances back in 2004 Scottish indie darlings Franz Ferdinand were achieving chart success and critical acclaim thanks to their debut album (imaginatively titled Franz Ferdinand), which won them the Mercury Music Prize, a Brit Award, a Grammy nomination and has shifted almost 4 million copies to date. The band behind ‘Take Me Out’, Franz Ferdinand, are no exception, but there’s something about naming a band after the Austrian duke whose assassination triggered the outbreak of World War 1 that’s particularly awful. U2, Coldplay, Radiohead, The Beatles, Pink Floyd – regardless of how great they may be musically and commercially the reality remains that they all are garbage. It’s got to feel as if you’re being spoken to as much as sung to in the natural cadences of conversation.Here’s a thought to consider: all band names are terrible. Because that’s what’s got to be right, the delivery of the vocals has to be natural. So after we halved it, we sped it up a bit. So, we halved the tempo and then it sounded just a little bit too slow. Then I said look if we half the tempo, it’s going to sound better in the verse. We had this problem, whenever we tried to play it with the band we just couldn’t get it to seem to work. It was kind of like the verse and then I say don’t you know… But we couldn’t get the temp right. Originally, it had a more traditional structure. And that was when the chorus was at the right tempo. Nick was playing along on an old crappy Yamaha synthesizer sort of thing.īut when we wrote it, the temps were wrong. But at the same time, I wanted it to be dance music. Those answering lines is what I was trying to do there. There’s a real dark, sinister element to it. The really sinister-sounding stuff like “ Smokestack Lighting,” that kind of stuff. And some of it kind of-eh-doesn’t really engage me so much. I’ve got a very mixed attitude to blues music. I was trying to do that Hubert Sumlin and Howlin’ Wolf thing of like singing a line and then playing the guitar answer to it. And the guitar line I had, which became like the hook in the main part of the song, that came when I was singing the words, as the words were coming out of my head. And when your intentions are both apparent but neither of you wants to give away your position.Īnd the tension is almost unbearable and you want to the other person-you’re almost desperate to the point where you want the other person to literally take you out or figuratively take you out. I found that to be a good metaphor for romantic situations that you can sometimes find yourself in in life, kind of like a romantic stand-off you might stumble into if you were particularly of a shy nature and the other person was, as well. One of them was a Soviet sniper and one of them was a German sniper. And the essence of the plot was that two snipers were in position waiting to literally take each other out. ![]() ![]() Nick and I were sharing a flat at the time. American Songwriter caught up with Kapranos to ask him about the origins of “Take Me Out.” Here’s what the songwriter, guitarist, and frontman had to say about its beginnings and fitting the sonic puzzle pieces together.Īmerican Songwriter: What was the genesis of “Take Me Out”?Īlex Kapranos: I love playing it, it’s a banger.
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