110%

Album: Devotion (2012)
Charted: 61
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Songfacts®:

  • Jessie Ware wrote this light-hearted upbeat song about dancing with Bristol house producer Julio Bashmore. She told The Guardian that initially things were awkward. "Writing a Pop song was a new thing for both of us, and I started to feel really self-conscious and out of my depth," she admitted. To break the tension, Ware and Bashmore started flicking through a Hip-Hop magazine. Their attention was caught by a striking image of the large Puerto-Rican/American rapper Big Pun sitting on a throne. "I decided, 'Right, I'm going to write a song about a girl trying to get him off his throne and dance'," she said.
  • Repeated throughout the song there is a sample of Big Pun reciting the line, "carving my initials on your forehead" from his track, "The Dream Shatterer." "There was something quite obscene about that line that I kind of wanted to see if I could get away sampling one of the biggest, most beloved rappers on top of this very sweet vocal," Ware recalled to Billboard magazine with a laugh. "It just cuts through and sounds really good with the song."
  • The song's music video was directed by Kate Moross and filmed at Painshill Park, an 18th-century English landscape park located at Cobham, Surrey.
  • The "110%" song title is a playful reference to Big Pun's song "100%"
  • The ethereal love song was re-titled "If You're Never Gonna Move" for its American release. This was due to sample clearance issues with the estate of Big Pun. "We had to be imaginative and change the words. It's annoying but it always happens," Ware told Billboard magazine.
  • Ware told MTV News that it was "odd" that the song had to be retitled and reworked after she couldn't clear the Big Pun sample. "I basically wrote the song based on the idea of trying to get [Big Pun] out of his chair," she said, "and onto the dancefloor... you know, this massive kind of guy who just won't budge, even though you really want him to."

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