Lucid Dreams

Album: Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • Frontman Alex Kapranos told Rolling Stone that this song started off sounding like a classic Franz Ferdinand tune, but "now it's probably the most far out of all the songs."
  • An earlier version was released as a digital only single through iTunes in August 2008, the band's first single release since "Eleanor Put Your Boots On" in July 2006.
  • This was included on the in-game soundtrack to the video game Madden 09.
  • Guitarist Nick McCarthy told The Sun January 23, 2009 that the electronic section at the end of this song was the last thing the band recorded for the Tonight: Franz Ferdinand album. He added: "All the electronic stuff was completely improvised. It was one long take. We did an hour of it and then had to cut it down. It was really lots of fun to do."
  • Ferdinand Kapranos (from self-titled magazine): "I love the state you're in when you're half awake and half asleep and you have some vague control of your dreams. It's better than any film you could go to or any music. It's so vivid. So that's the theme of the song, and it's quite different from anything we've done before. That's actually the shortest version. The section at the end was originally, like, 45 minutes long, and even though it's electronic, we didn't use the processing of the computer. There's a certain sound of modern records that sounds incredibly two-dimensional when everything's kept in the computer."
  • The Tonight: Franz Ferdinand album describes a raucous night on the town. Kapranos explained to self-titled magazine that this song describes the "coming back down and dreaming and drifting off" part of the night, after "psyching yourself up and going wild."

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