Dynamo

Album: Playland (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • This big rocker about love for a building was the first song Marr wrote for his second solo album, Playland. He told Rolling Stone: "I kept on writing as soon as The Messenger came out. I wrote a few songs on the road and kicked them around in soundcheck. I didn't want to change up what I was doing; I just wanted it to be more of it."
  • The song was inspired by an early morning stroll past the CIS Tower, a glass skyscraper in Manchester. "It's a love song to a building," Marr laughed to Mojo magazine, "but it could also double as a love song to a person or even to oneself. Inevirably, however hard you try, songs turn out to be about yourself in some way."
  • The lyrics were inspired by Marr's interest in psychogeography, which is the study of an environment's effect on the behavior of the humans within it. "It might happen when you look up at a building, modern or old, on a clear summer day, big blue sky behind it filled with jet streams, and not being able to help think of stories that go with it all," he told NME. "I've been interested in the city and the people in it since I was a kid, it has this romantic attraction I just clicked with. Then when I was older I started reading more about it and got into the philosophy behind it."

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