Spiralling

Album: Perfect Symmetry (2008)
Charted: 23
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Songfacts®:

  • Keyboard player and chief songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley told Q magazine September 2008 that this is his favorite track on the album. He described this as "an excessive '80s groove" adding, "it makes me want to wear shoulder pads!"
  • Singer Tom Chaplin described the song as "a train of thought about human endeavor, built on an outrageous groove."
  • In a week-long promotion at the beginning of August 2008, this song was made available for free through the band's web site. 500,000 downloads were logged, making it according to its label Universal/Island, its most popular free download ever. On August 11, 2008 it was released as a digital download single only. Rice-Oxley told The Daily Mail: "It wasn't intended as a single. It was music for the sake of it."
  • Rice-Oxley read Classics at University College London, and he has admitted his classical learning has influenced his songwriting. For instance this song's lyrics were influenced by Book X of Ovid's poem Metamorphoses, which tells of the Cypriot sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with a statue he has made.
  • Rice-Oxley explained on Perfect Symmetry's bonus DVD that this was the first song off the album that Keane released, "because we felt that it was really important song in terms of the way we made the record and the spirit of the making of the record. It's a song that really defined the whole creative process for us and opened us up to a whole new way of working I think. We love what we've achieved with it sonically and lyrically it is definitely is one of the songs on the album that is about, kind of the gap between what we dream of being as people and what we actually achieve and its quite unusual for us, its quite a train of thought type song lyrically. We're really really proud of it and very pleased to get it out there."
  • This was awarded Track of the Year at the Q Magazine Awards in October 2008. >>
    Suggestion credit:
    Bertrand - Paris, France

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