Magic Mountain

Album: Crooked Timber (2009)
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Songfacts®:

  • This track has a ten minute running time. In an interview with entertainnment.ie, the interviewer commented that he didn't recall "any sprawling 10 minute long songs on any previous Therapy? albums." Vocalist Andy Cairns replied: "It was originally longer too! Neil (Cooper, drummer) was listening to Secret Machines. I quite like them and Neil loves them. I said that it reminds me of a bit of Krautrock. You can really see where Queens of the Stone Age got some of their early influence. We just started jamming on these riffs and harmonics and we cut it down and put in a little bit of stoppages and changes. There's a really mad Andy Gill mix of it somewhere and it's about 14 minutes long and it goes absolutely to the top of the effects pedals!"

    Cairns added that he had no doubts about putting such a lengthy song on the album. He said: "We just took it back to the rehearsal room and listened to the raw version and thought it was really, really good. Then we knew that we had to put it on the album, but if we put it on the album we have to be able to play it live. So we were all in agreement about that. It's bizarre, I took it home and my wife's taste in music is different to my own and she absolutely loved it. It's come up in quite a lot of the interviews that people like it."
  • Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) is a 1924 novel by the German writer Thomas Mann, which is set in a Swiss sanatorium high up in the Alps.

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