The first time we played the whole song in the rehearsal room, I joked: “This would sound really good on the radio.” But I was thinking of a session on John Peel or something – if we were lucky. We thought it would be funny to spoof the sounds you got on Queen records or the beginning of Eye of the Tiger. The short staccato bursts of sound – where you hit a cymbal and hold it to stop it resonating – came about because Bob Hardy, our bass-player, had read an article about “sports rock”, the music played at sports games in the US. The tempo of the chorus was much slower than the verse, so I suggested playing all the verses at the beginning, but slower, then the choruses. And then we’ll play the chorus and the riff.”Īnd fuck it, it sounded cool! That’s a very truncated version of the story but that’s more or less how it happened.The “I know I won’t be leaving here with you” section formed a bridge between the verse and chorus, but when we rehearsed it with the band, it didn’t sound right. Then we’ll slow it down, we’ll do some hits, which are the musical manifestation of the hits that are being alluded to in the lyrical content of the song. I was like, “What the hell are we going to do then?” But I said, “Oh, you know what? Let’s take all the verses and put them at the beginning of the song, and play them at the right speed. So, we then put ourselves in a situation where the verses were too fast and the choruses were too slow. It’s got to feel as if you’re being spoken to as much as sung to in the natural cadences of conversation. 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. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100.īut where did the inspiration for the song come from? How did the band, which included frontman Alex Kapranos, conceptualize the tune? For starters, it all began, Kapranos says, with a sniper movie.Īmerican 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. top singles chart and it hit that same number on the U.S.
The track, which was released in 2004 as the band’s second single from their self-titled LP, is likely the band’s biggest song to date. In fact, that was what helped originate the idea. The hit song, “Take Me Out,” by the Scottish rock band Franz Ferdinand is like a slug to the head.
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