Tonight's The Kind of Night

Album: Last Night On Earth (2011)
Charted: 67
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Songfacts®:

  • Last Night on Earth has a strong cinematic element, influenced by Frontman Charlie Fink's experience directing the short film that accompanied The First Days of Spring. "Film is such a different writing process, it infiltrates the way I write songs," he explained. "And a lot of them I imagined as scenes - 'Tonight's the Kind of Night' I imagined as this guy running away from home and getting on a bus."
  • The song captures the thrill of unleashed youth and it was the first track written for Last Night on Earth. Fink told The Sun: "The first thing I had for the record was the lyric, 'tonight's the kind of night where everything could change.' But for ages I didn't have the verses for it or know where I wanted the song to go. But then on New Year's Eve last year I had a train ride from Wales to London. Bob Dylan once said songs feel like looking out the window of a moving train. And on that train ride I finished the lyrics and found the thread for the album, the limitless possibilities of the night and the freedom of that."
  • Fink was asked by Contactmusic.com, which is his favorite track on Last Night on Earth. He replied: "It's a tough one because it's like picking between your kids [laughs]. But I'm very proud of the lyrics of the second track on the album, 'Tonight's The Kind Of Night,' because it was the first song written on the album and it was the moment that I realised I was changing the style of writing, and the moment that I had found the voice of the record - a real breakthrough moment."
  • The song is an anthem of escape, although the destination is kept deliberately unspecific. Fink told The Daily Telegraph: "When I was 18, I drove across the States for three months, playing my guitar at open-mic nights. I love that feeling of being lost for days and just bearing straight on down. It can be hard to transpose that romantic, Springsteen idea to England, because in America you can get in a car and drive into huge stretches of nothing, going nowhere. In England, you get on the motorway, drive for three hours and you're in Leeds or Sheffield. But the landscape outside is irrelevant. Sometimes just a journey from suburbia to the centre of town can be as exciting and potentially life-changing as driving off into the great unknown."

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