Songfacts®:

• "Karaoke" is a collaborative lyric between Everything But The Girl's Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. Thorn's chorus asks, what is singing for? Watt's verses recount a trip he made to a karaoke bar in San Francisco some years previously.
• When Watt arrived in San Francisco for a work trip, he tried to stay up and break his jetlag with a trip to a karaoke bar.
  
  "Some old guys got up and started singing Jackson Brown and Dylan, and the place was unmoved," he recalled to Mojo magazine. "But then around midnight the regulars started to arrive, and I realized that it was a little scene on its own. And the place just took off. I loved this microcosmic environment."
  
  Watt showed the lyrics to Thorn, but it wasn't complete, just three descriptive verses. "Then she thought, 'That makes me think about why we sing,' and wrote the hooklines," said Watt.
• For Thorn, it's a song just about music. "What do we sing for?" she questioned. "What does it mean to people? Is there a difference between karaoke and other kinds of performance? Well, no, there isn't. Really everything is karaoke. We're all trying to express something."
• "Karaoke" is the closing track of Fuse, Everything But The Girl's 11th studio album. The record comprises a mix of electronic and acoustic tracks. "A slow empty groove to end the album," said Watt to Apple Music, "distorted organ, CS-80, West Coast Moog."
• Fuse peaked at #3 on the UK Official Albums Chart. It also reached the Top 10 in several other countries, including Belgium and Switzerland.