Sweet Spot

Album: Present Tense (2014)
Play Video

Songfacts®:

  • This song finds Hayden Thorpe and Tom Fleming singing of a dream state, halfway between asleep and awake over picked guitars and sparse synth. Fleming told NME: "This has a very clean guitar and synth, which we were careful not to overuse. When we sat down to record this album, we realized, 'This wants to be a pop record now.'"
  • Hayden Thorpe told DIY magazine the tune went through a huge amount of versions. "We almost wrote it off," he said. "We just couldn't get it right. The barometer was flinging either from being this Ibiza thing straight back into this song you couldn't focus on. And we couldn't get it to level out. Like most moments on the record, when we had half an hour of demo time left we scrapped what we had and started again. Within half an hour the dual guitar line came about."

    "The song itself has been around for a long time," Thorpe continued. It's about euthanasia, really. What I think a beautiful pop song should be able to do is take a very difficult subject and make it sound completely weightless; throw it up in the air like it's a feather. That's what I wanted 'Sweet Spot' to do. This might sound morbid, but the song also refers to how death and sex are from the same creature. It's the snake's head and the snake's tail."

Comments

Be the first to comment...

Editor's Picks

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot

Jon Foreman of SwitchfootSongwriter Interviews

Switchfoot's frontman and main songwriter on what inspires the songs and how he got the freedom to say exactly what he means.

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo Lyric

Wherefore Art Thou Romeo LyricMusic Quiz

In this quiz, spot the artist who put Romeo into a song lyric.

Colin Hay

Colin HaySongwriter Interviews

Established as a redoubtable singer-songwriter, the Men At Work frontman explains how religion, sobriety and Jack Nicholson play into his songwriting.

Lecrae

LecraeSongwriter Interviews

The Christian rapper talks about where his trip to Haiti and his history of addiction fit into his songs.

Elton John

Elton JohnFact or Fiction

Does he have beef with Gaga? Is he Sean Lennon's godfather? See if you can tell fact from fiction in the Elton John edition.

Emmylou Harris

Emmylou HarrisSongwriter Interviews

She thinks of herself as a "song interpreter," but back in the '80s another country star convinced Emmylou to take a crack at songwriting.