Solo Dancing

Album: No Romeo (2014)
Charted: 14
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Songfacts®:

  • Nottingham-born singer-songwriter Indiana first got into music when her sister moved house but couldn't find room for her piano in her new place. Indiana offered to store it in her dining room and started playing around on the keys. She picked it up quite quickly and by 2010 was writing songs. By the end of the following year Indiana started concentrating on making a career as a recording artist and on February 17, 2013 she released her debut single "Bound."

    The Nottingham native scored her first UK chart hit with this euphemistically-titled song in which she describes her penchant for dancing "to the bitter end" by herself.
  • The song's single release also contains three remixes by Chris Lake, Joe Goddard and KAOS.
  • Ostensibly a song about joyously dancing on your own, both Indiana's detached vocal delivery and the minimal, icy instrumentation make the listener question their assumptions about its meaning. "I write these songs that can appear to be love songs, and seem all nice and sweet," she told Billboard magazine. "But then you peel away that first layer and chip away at that exterior, and they're all dark and a little bit twisted, and a bit sinister … I'm quite an odd person anyway, but I think if I didn't write these songs, I'd probably be doing horrible stuff. I write these songs to save other people from things I might do."
  • Indiana wrote the song with John Beck and Steve Chrisanthou. She told Billboard that inspired by the synth-noir sound of Cliff Martinez's 2011 Drive soundtrack, the intention was to create "something more uptempo" than the tracks she'd previously released on YouTube, such as like "Bound," "Smoking Gun" and "Animal." "I've put out things prior to 'Solo Dancing' that I wrote after 'Solo Dancing,' so there has been a progression in songwriting, but I think 'Solo Dancing' was always going to be one of the strongest things I've written," she admitted. "In my head, it's still unfinished, because it was something that I couldn't quite draw a line underneath. I kept going back to it production-wise. The label loved it so much that they said, 'We need to take this now, you've got to stop.'"

    John Beck and Steve Chrisanthou previous credits together include co-writing Corinne Bailey Rae's breakthrough hit tune "Put Your Records On" and Eliza Doolittle's single "Mr. Medicine."

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