Song Exploder - Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

The band Franz Ferdinand formed in 2002, in Glasgow, Scotland. They’ve won the Mercury Prize and two BRIT Awards, they have five Grammy nominations, and they’ve sold millions of albums. One of their first singles is this song, “Take Me Out,” and it’s also their biggest hit. In this episode, singer and guitarist Alex Kapranos tells the story of how he and his bandmates made the song, from the original home demo to the final studio recording. To learn more, visit songexploder.net/franz-ferdinand.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. I've always loved writing with other people. And my first experiences of songwriting were with my best friend, Andrew, from school. We both started playing guitar about the same time, and we were both obsessed with the Beatles. We had one of these books, you know these kind of like how to play the Beatles chords books. And we just couldn't do it. Like we learned the chords, but they just didn't.

sound right. And years later, like, it's funny, I was in my girlfriend's flat. She had the same book, and I picked it up. I was like, no way, this is the book that me and Andrew tried to learn the guitar from. When I start playing along with that, I was like, no way, these chords are all wrong. And I was like, all these years later, like, as somebody who knows the guitar a little bit better than when I was like 14 or whatever, I was like, no way, that's why we couldn't learn these songs, because the chords are actually wrong. But I have so much to thank that book for, because Because because the songs didn't sound right when we played them, Andrew and I, we both said, like,

let's just make our own songs up with the chords that we know. And that's how I started writing songs. It was because if we wrote our own songs, nobody was going to tell us that they didn't sound how they were supposed to sound because it was us who dictated how they were supposed to sound. I am Alex Capranos of the band Franz Ferdinand. Franz Ferdinand formed in 2002 in Glasgow, Scotland. They've sold millions of albums.

They've won the Mercury Prize and two Brit Awards, and they have five Grammy nominations. One of their first singles, Take Me Out, is also their biggest hit. In this episode, singer and guitarist Alex Capranos tells the story of how he and his bandmates made the song, from the original home demo to the final studio recording. Nick McCarthy, who was in the band with me at the time, he and I shared a flat in Glasgow.

We were both writing a lot of songs at the time. some songs I would write myself and some songs we would write together. I was really taken with the idea of writing songs in the original Lenin McCartney style, kind of like head to head. The two of you sitting opposite each other kind of working it out. I remember hearing from Nick's room, he was mucking about on one of these old keyboards. The kind of thing you would get for Christmas when you were 12 or 13, like my first MIDI keyboard kind of thing. they're great because they have the auto accompaniment mode on them so you can hold your finger down on a key and it'll play a crappy bass line and it'll play the chords or whatever so I had one of these in the flat and I heard Nick in his bedroom mucking about with it there was this little melody and it went don't doon do do don't de do just like that there's just this little basic kind of thing and I just remember chapping on his door saying oh come on let's let's make something let's make a song So we took it into the other room and we start trying different progressions you could do behind that little hook.

Yeah, I remember it very well. I had an acoustic guitar and Nick was playing on this little kind of a keyboard thing. I mean, it sounds really crap because it was a really bad recording. You know, the little dictaphone sort of things you would get. I guess I would use that back then the same way that most musicians use their phone nowadays, you know, like you take voice notes or whatever. Digga, digger, digger, digger, digger. So that's the bluegrass accompaniment setting on a Yamaha keyboard from the mid-90s.

It was all right, it sounded kind of jaunty and it sounded kind of fun. So it started off with that and not actually the melody that it ended up as in the end. The night before I'd watched a film. called Enemy at the Gates. And it's set during the Second World War, set around the siege of Stalingrad. And one of the themes of the film is this standoff between two snipers. Jude Law is the Soviet sniper and Ed Harris's, the evil Nazi. And they're both kind of tucked away, hidden from each other, waiting for the other to

make a move and to expose themselves. Because as soon as the other makes a move, the other will know where they are and will take them out. And so I had this film fresh in my head the next day when I was mucking about with Nick on this song. It was okay, you know, not a bad film, but this image of the two snipers left quite an impact on me. It felt like a very good metaphor for the kind of romantic situations that we sometimes find ourselves in. You know where, you know, you both know that you're into the other, but nobody wants to kind of like expose their vulnerability and make a move and let the other know how they feel. And so I could write, so you can't really tell what am I talking about here? Am I talking about snipers or am I talking

about some kind of romantic situation? I wrote on a bunch of imagery straight away for the idea for the verses. So if you're lonely, you know, I'm here waiting for you. I'm just a crosshair, just a shot away from you. And then I said, all right, okay, let's get a chorus together. At the time, I was really, really into Howling Wolf, the old blues guy. And I always loved the way that he would like sing to the guitar and the guitar would then sing back to him.

Ding ding, do do do, oh, asked her for water. Dumb, do, dung, d'em, do. Like so good, like I loved it. And the way that the guitar and the vocal, but they were kind of like two dancing. intertwining their bodies across a smooth, over-polished dance floor. Like, it was really, really powerful. And so I thought, I really wanted to do something like that.

And so like, I say, don't you know, do-down-d-do-do-do, like this kind of like thing. And I guess that's how you end up doing your own thing, isn't it? Like, you listen to somebody you love doing something, you kind of go, wow, that's great, I'm going to, no, I'm not going to do it like that, because I'm not that. And then you kind of change it and then it becomes your thing. And the phrase, take me out.

Are you asking you? me to take you out on a date or he asked me to take me out with a bullet. I always loved that in a song lyric like a degree of ambiguity and immediately simultaneously. So we then took it to the band. At that point, the band members were Bob Hardy playing bass, Paul Thompson playing drums and Nick McCarthy playing guitar. And we kind of got our heads around it to a degree. And we played at a gig, but it never felt right. I always felt kind of wrong because if the chorus tempo was right,

then the verse tempo felt too slow. And if the verse tempo was right, then the chorus tempo felt too fast. And so we kind of left it for a little bit and thought, oh yeah, we should come back to that at some point. Then one day I had this idea. I said, right, look, we've got this problem with the tempo of the song. Why do we just take all the verses?

We'll play them just all together. You know from you and if you leave here Then we'll slow down And then we'll play all the choruses together And then we don't have to worry Then you've got both tempos like both tempos are right So we tried that and it felt it felt really good But it needed something else as well

It needed something really dramatic And rather than try and be apologetic About the tempo change just kind of be really really super bold about it and own it. This led to another idea that we'd had. There was something that was kind of like a bit of an in-joke amongst us at the time. Bob had come across some young guy in the States and his favorite genre of music was what he called sports rock. And we found this amazingly amusing. Like we'd never heard this term before, sports rock. And what he meant was rock which was played in sports stadiums. Is that genre? Is that an actual thing? Yeah, yeah. In the 90s,

there were like compilations called Jock Rock and Jock Jams. No way, right? So it is actually a thing. Like, see, we thought it was just some mad kid in the States. I guess we are the least sporty people you could ever come across in the world. If you think of what a jock is, then make the inverse of it. I guess then you'd find us. And so we thought it would be funny if we played sports rock in some way. The sort of things that he was putting in his lists of favorite sports rock songs were things like Queen and Eye of the Tiger. And we said, so what makes it sports rock?

And one of the things that we felt identified it was the symbol catch. It's when you hit the symbol and then catch it immediately with your hands. So it goes, it just sounded both highly amusing to us and extremely exciting at the same time. So we'd written these chords. And rather than just having guitars strumming chords, I found that really, really boring. All of us, we're really into like early sequenced synthesizer music. I really loved Maroder and DAF and that kind of thing. and often the way it's arranged is monophonic synthesizers

held on an arpeggiator doing single notes kind of like did-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d. I thought, well, it would be great to take that approach to arrangement and stick it on guitars and have the guitars mimicking monophonic synthesizers. So you've got the three notes in the chord and I took the three notes and put them on the three different instruments, the bass guitar one.

guitar too, which felt pretty cool to me. It's funny listening to it as well because even though we were trying to play like sequenced synthesizers, we really weren't pulling it off because it's so kind of like imperfect. And that's what I love about it. Listening to it, it's like, yeah, that's really kind of not right. It's really kind of not on the beat. But it's when you're kind of like pulling and pushing and like pulling yourself back in time

with each other. And I guess that's what makes a band. It's like listening to each other and pulling yourself in to be in line. with each other. What we were doing with the guitars was like having this sort of like the intertwining melodies so like where they were kind of crossing over each other and you couldn't tell one from the other and we were doing the same thing with the vocal as well. I sang lead and Nick would do a kind of like a backup. I know I won't believe it. I know I when we ended up recording we recorded with Tor Johansson so we went over to Malmo in the

south of Sweden to a studio called Gula Studios. And I remember saying to him that we were all really into dance music. Like we would go to clubs a lot together and so much of dance music is led by the kick drum. And I remember we were saying to tour, we really want the kick drum to be like really powerful and deep. And he was like, oh, I've got this great idea which was to tape two kick drums together, put one against the other, then tape them together. So it makes like, one super long, extra long kick drum. And what it does to the acoustics of that is everything is just like consistently loud, like on an 808. The were all these kind of like small decisions like that, which was like, like, how do we kind of like get what we love about dance music and what we love

about the rawness of being in a live band together? And we all liked this song. I also remember Tor's wife was really into that song as well. Like she thought, I remember her coming down the studio and said, oh, that one's really nice, that's really catchy. But I remember Tor hated it. He was like, I don't know why you're recording this one. But then I remember him one day, so I was saying, well, no, I was talking to my wife, and she says, she really likes her. She said, it's very catchy, we should work on it.

And so, thanks, Tors, Mrs. You saved the song. I really wanted to rebel against what I called Pro Tools Rock at the time. Even if you didn't play to a click, like the, the trend, and it's still kind of rife within recording, which is to put everything in time, and you get these wonderfully correct, boring, sounding performances. And like, I hate it. Like, I really hate it. And again, going back to, like, the thing about when Andrew and I were writing songs together,

if you're writing the song, nobody can tell you that's the wrong thing to do. And it's maybe a useful realization to realize that there is no right and no proper way of doing things. And often the proper way to do things is the boring way to do things. And there's no sin worse than the sin of being boring. And now here's Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand in its entirety. Visit songexplotor.net. You'll find links to stream or download Take Me Out. And you can watch the video.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that.

It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuckus, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. This episode and the show's theme music were made by me, with editing help from Casey Deal and Craig Ely, artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith, and production assistants from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi-Hurway, and you can follow the show at SongExploder. You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radio Tokyo.