I Remember

Album: Odd Blood (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • Keyboardist/vocalist Chris Keating recalled the writing of this song to MTV News: "It was a demo recording, made in the basement - the same setup we had when we were making the All Hour Cymbals record. And I just had my busted-up Nord [keyboard], and I just kind of worked out these weird sounds that I thought were interesting together. And a lot of stuff I do like that, I'm trying to achieve a sound I like. And you get that tone, then it's cool. You lock it in, you write down all the numbers and all the dials, and from there, I know I can write something on top of it. And I had just met my wife, and I started writing a love song, so I kind of just ran with it. I'm afraid of flying, but the first time I met my wife, we made out on a plane."
    Guitarist Anand Wilder added: "My only input was to try and steer us away from adding too much to it, because I think Chris did a really good job of getting these tones that really sat well in the mix. And it was just this demo that really sounded almost finished. And slowly we began adding on to it, and we did a live version and made it twice as long, and then we made compromises, and eventually it became the four-and-a-half-minute-long mixtape love ballad of 2010."
  • Wilder told Drowned In Sound: "For this album we set out to make some love songs and I think Chris really hit the nail on the head here, 'I remember this about the start of our relationship', 'I remember that', 'I remember you', 'I remember making love'... so he basically made that track entirely on his own on keyboard and I thought he really did a good job of choosing the right tone and frequency. For me that song was all about not adding too much to it."
  • About.com commented to Keating that the lyrics on Odd Blood are much more straightforward than on 2007's All Hour Cymbals and appear to have switched from their visions of a dystopian futuristic society to love and romance. Keating responded: "I don't know why people picked up so much on the apocalyptic side [of All Hour Cymbals]; it was there, but so was a lot of positivity, and a lot of songs about weather. But, you just try to challenge yourself, and write things in new ways. After we'd done that first record, we thought 'what haven't we written about?' We tried to branch out and do something different. In our case, that was doing something more traditional, so there was a certain effort to maybe write some love songs. To us, it seemed exotic to go that route."
  • Some reviewers have commented on the similarities of this song's sound to the works of '70s-80s Greek electronic ambient composer Vangelis. Keating confirmed to Q magazine March 2009 that Vangelis is a "really big influence" for him. He added: "I've always liked a lot of the '70s electronic ambient artists like Vangelis and Tangerine Dream and their scores for films such as Blade Runner and Tangerine Dream."

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