Sugar

Album: Not Your Kind of People (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • This dark, sensual electronic ballad finds Shirley Manson singing about what appears to be a sex worker. "Look but don't touch till the light goes on," she whispers. Guitarist told Duke Erikson told MusicRadar.com how the song came together: "I had come up with an idea on acoustic guitar, very simple," he said, "so I recorded it with a little rhythm track, did the first verse and basically the arrangement for the song. Shirley loved it and immediately started singing – I think she must had had some words already written."

    "Originally, I had a straighter rhythm, but we started messing around with a dubby kind of irregular pattern," he continued. "I played drums on the song - I cut them at Smart Studios in Madison. Mike Zirkel, the engineer there, got me set up, I played some stuff, and we picked what worked. The drums aren't very prominent, but they serve their purpose."

    Erikson concluded: "The song could still work as a straight-ahead acoustic samba. But as it happens with all our tunes, we stretched it out and looked for as many sounds as we could, without harming the song. It's easy with experimentation to lose the song, so we try to be aware of that."
  • Speaking to Idolator.com, Erikson described Manson's vocal as "quite amazing."

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