Recovery

Album: Tape Deck Heart (2013)
Charted: 75
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the lead single from Frank Turner's fifth album, Tape Deck Heart, which the English singer-songwriter recorded in Burbank, California, with American producer and engineer Rich Costey (My Chemical Romance, Muse, Jane's Addiction). "It's an autobiographical song ... [but] it's not a song about getting better, but it's about the act of realizing you have a problem, and you need to sort your life out," Turner explained to MTV News. "It came to me in one of those moments of clarity in the middle of a long, solid drunk where you go 'What am I doing? Who are these people?'"
  • Turner revealed to MTV News that the lyric, "On the night we met. You said 'Well, darling, let's make a deal. If anybody ever asks us. Let's just say that we met in jail'" came from a real-world relationship.
  • The song starts with the lyric, "Blacking in and out in a strange flat in east London. Somebody I don't really know just gave me something." This is one of several references to seeking solace at the bottom of a bottle on Tape Deck Heart. Turner admitted to NME that having entered his thirties, he saw the need to cut down on his boozing. "I'm 31 now," he said, "and I think there's a no-man's land between where you're drinking and partying the whole time, and actually having serious problems. And as you get older, that no-man's land shrinks a bit.
    "In the last year I've been trying to cut down on my Baccanalian habits," he continued, because it's not good for you, and you end up in bad places."
  • The old-school album artwork was done by Heather Ann Law, a tattoo artist from Florida who came to Turner's shows and gave him some drawings she'd done for some of his songs. He told NME: "I love her work and it fit for her come up with ideas for the cover. I'm really into tattoo culture and style generally."
  • The lyric about, "blacking in and out in a strange flat in east London," is a reference to a model's house party that Turner attended. He told Digital Spy: "Not usually the sort of place I hang out. Yes, I had a moment of clarity and was thinking, 'Why the f--k am I here?' So that's where that song came from."

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