Looking Back

Album: Night Train (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • This track features Somali/Canadian rapper K'Naan, who also contributed to the EP's lead single, "Stop For a Minute." Drummer Richard Hughes told Spinner UK how they hooked up with K'Naan: "The first time I'd heard of K'Naan was when we were doing an interview and Tom (Chaplin, vocalist) mentioned him in a Tracks Of The Year-type list he was doing.
    K'Naan then mentioned he liked Keane in an interview, so we thought we'd see what happened if went into the studio together. Three songs came out in three days, and two of them are on the EP."
    Chaplin added: "It had to be a face to face thing, as well. We didn't want to just send each other the tracks. I like him because he's a hip hop artist that isn't about posturing, and that cliché that's developed in hip hop. He's very soulful and very philosophical, and that chimed with what we are as a band.
    It was great to have him around, he's a great singer, a great lyricist, and he really added a new dimension to what we do, in a way that we'd never have imagined before. It was a really successful collaboration."
  • This samples the Rocky theme song, "Gonna Fly Now." Chaplin explained the sample to Consequence of Sound: "It kind of happened by mistake. Tim (Rice-Oxley-keyboards) was telling me that when he originally started writing that song, he had this riff for it going around in his head. He said, 'I've come up with this amazing riff!' Once he played it a few times and done a little demo of the song, he realized it was exactly the same as the Rocky riff. It was a case of mistaken identity. The song developed out of that. It's like how many hip-hop artists made their records. They started with a sample or an idea and then turned it into something else."
  • Chaplin described Keane's collaborations with K'Naan to Billboard magazine as "songs about the human condition-time, fear, love, regret."

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