Katherine Kiss Me

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

  • Franz Ferdinand lead singer Alex Kapranos told Uncut magazine February 2008 that this song "started out an acoustic song about a girl I kissed many years ago."
  • This song uses a human skeleton for percussion, which had been bought by Kapranos and guitarist Nick McCarthy from a Glasgow auction as part of an antique skeleton set recovered from a dead doctor's office. Kapranos explained to MTV News: "I remember we were working on a song called 'Kiss Me,' and we wanted to have a real dry, percussive sound in the chorus. And we had this skeleton in a box that just ended up sitting in the corner of the studio, and we all sort of looked at it, and decided to experiment with it. Nick had the hands and was clapping the bones together. [Drummer] Paul [Thomson] was working with the pelvis bone and a femur. We put the teeth in a glass jar and rattled that about. We smacked the ribs together and we got this really weird, f---ed-up kind of a sound that was wicked. I can't think of any records with human bones on it."
  • This song mirrors another track on the Franz Ferdinand: Tonight album "No You Girls." Alex Kapranos explained to Rolling Stone that the two play "on the idea of how we choose to remember events in our life - so one version is the memory and the other is the way it actually happened."

    He told self-titled magazine that on this song, it "is how you would remember the same event if you were recalling it honestly and remembering the awkwardness and how it maybe wasn't as satisfying as you'd hoped."
  • The Tonight: Franz Ferdinand album describes a night out on the town. Kapranos explained to the New Musical Express January 17,2009 that on this song, "Evening's over. Dawn's ripping through the curtains. You kind of wish everything would be normal again. This is the sort of song I'd play to soothe myself at a time like that."

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