Siberian Nights

Album: Ash & Ice (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • This was written by The Kills guitarist Jamie Hince during a solo trip that he took on the Trans Siberian Express. He told Tonedeaf.com: "I thought our record would be sort of paranoid and romantic. So I was on the Trans-Siberian Express, freezing cold, snow outside, silver birch trees, and I wrote a song about Vladimir Putin. It was at the height of the Pussy Riot thing, and I just wanted to write a song where Putin's almost too masculine, riding bare-chested on a horse and all this stuff."
  • Lyrically this is pretty sexually explicit and homoerotic. Hince told Artist Direct: "I just wanted to use all this sort of masculine bravado and sexual boasting, almost like one of those old-fashioned kind of hip-hop records, like bigging yourself up, but it's Putin.

    And then there's this middle section that goes all soft and psychedelic, which is this kind of section where he's become so masculine that he just needs a break from it, and he just wants to hug another man [laughs]. And I kind of just wanted to make this, I don't know, it was just my imagination on the Trans Siberian Express, my brain eating itself [laughs]."

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