Euphoria, Take My Hand

Album: Euphoric Heartbreak (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the lead single from the Glasgow rock band Glasvegas's second album, Euphoric Heartbreak. It was recorded in Los Angeles under producer Flood (Smashing Pumpkins, U2). The official record title contains three forward and three backward slashes, which frontman James Allan claims represent, "the ascent, the crest of a wave, and then the crash."
  • The song was inspired by an experience when James Allan and his guitarist cousin Rab Allan were in Santa Monica staying at the beach house. James recalled to the Sunday Mail: "One night when we were looking out over the sea, the sun looked so bright reflecting off the water it was like fireworks. It seemed to dance with the music in my head."
  • James described "Euphoria" to the NME as a song about choices, "and opposites. The crossroads, man, it's the choices. Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows. The past, man, and the choices you have."

    Van Gogh's famous Wheatfield with Crows painting shows a large field of wheat against a dark forbidding sky, with crows circle menacingly overhead. The observer is faced with the indecision of three separate paths in the foreground.
  • The Euphoric Heartbreak album sleeve features an image of Marilyn Monroe shot during the filming of her last movie, the never-finished screwball comedy Something's Got To Give. Photographer George Barris took the shot on a Santa Monica beach close to where Glasvegas wrote the album. In a freaky moment of serendipity, James Allan had expressed his fondness for the picture before he found out where it had been taken. The sleeve is meant to show him looking out from the house towards Marilyn on the beach.

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