German Studies

Album: Mountain Battles (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This features Kim Deal singing in German. Deal explained to Pitchfork Media why: "I'm in the four-track, and I've got this simple riff [sings riff] on my guitar, and of course, now I gotta grab the microphone. I think it sounds cool, so I've got to sing something over it. I know that I want to sing German on top of it. It's just going to sound cooler. So I figured out the words that I would like to sing, and I knew that I wanted this silly, kind of simple riff that's kind of middling. It has no high frequency or low. It's just this taut, tense thing that continues on, relentless! [Sings riff] I knew that that would be a cool place to put Wagnerian harmonies of me and Kelley, these harmonies in German that go [sings gibberish German] whatever, and I knew that I wanted to stop in the song so that I could say "und so weiter."
  • Deal added in an interview with Mojo magazine January 2008: "I wrote this cool punk riff, and it just needed to be sung in German. But I don't speak any German so Kelley and I found this German teacher called Elsa to help us with the lyrics." Deal added laughing: "(Producer) Steve Albini's fiancée Heather says it could be our biggest song, if we didn't sing it in German!"

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