Turn Me On

Album: Scars & Stories (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • The Fray's third album Scars & Stories finds the band linking up for the first time with producer Brendan O'Brien (AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen). Guitarist Joe King told Billboard magazine about why they recruited O'Brien for the record: "Once we started to compile the album's list of songs, we started to kick around producers," he explained. "We didn't necessarily say, 'Let's have more guitars.' It's just, we wanted the sound 'big.' We wanted the record to sound big enough for the back row. We were even able to test out some of these songs when we toured with U2 last year and it was the best way to see if a song fell flat. And, several of them did (laughs). Brendan O'Brien just seemed to be a good fit for us. We wanted a guy who was decisive and could push us and he definitely did that."
  • This song is about a beautiful sexy girl who turns vocalist Isaac Slade on. The singer got the original idea for the funky, hot tune during a time of writing in Cape Town. He told Denver Westword: "I went down there and started having some ideas about this family curse. A girl comes in and falls in love with... kind of a Romeo and Juliet type situation, and she kind of falls in love and breaks the curse of generations - of kind of the father's sins and all that. And the girl is so mesmerizing. She's, like, free. She's like a belly dancer almost in a very rigid, stiff, kind of regimented, legalistic world. She comes in and kind of upsets the food cart."
  • On his return from Africa Slade and King pulled up an old 1940s YouTube clip of a fire dancer. The singer recalled to Denver Westword: "The girl had on this super hot belly dancer bikini, and she's like, 'I am going to dance the fire dance,' and then the music starts and she just has the most mesmerizing... I don't know if she's very good at talking. I don't know if she's very good at politics or if she made money in her life, but she knows how to dance. And her body and everything she did was mesmerizing. And so, I've been married long enough and had enough sex, that it's about time I started writing about it."
  • King told Jam! Music that O'Brien's input was invaluable, transforming the song into a totally different beast after the band debuted it during support slots for U2 in May 2011. "It kind of revealed that the nature of the song wasn't in the right place," he explained. "So after that whole experience, Brendan said, 'Guys, we need to sexy up this song a little bit, the music needs to fit the lyrics more.' So we had to re-approach that one and redo."

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