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Album: The Messenger (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • Johnny Marr told NME: "That particular song is sort of autobiographical, in a kind of lighthearted way. It's basically just me saying to the people around me, 'This is what I'm like.' It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek celebration of my own hyperactivity."
  • The song finds Marr quoting 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes' famous phrase "Cogito Ergo Sum," ("I think therefore I am".) He quipped to Mojo magazine, "I'm not beyond being a bit pretentious these days."
  • Descartes is not a name that crops up frequently on our database, but he did actually write a short treatise on music theory, Compendium Musicae, in which he stated: "The end [of music] is that it please, and that it move in us various affections." The philosopher penned the work for his early mentor, Isaac Beeckman and presented it to him as a gift on New Years Day 1619. The two friends later fell out and ten years later, believing that Beeckman claimed credit for some of his theories about music, Descartes sent him a letter in which he demanded that his former mentor return the Compendium Musicae. The philosopher went on to remark cuttingly that he had learned as much from Beeckman as he had learned "from ants and worms."

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