Take Me Out

"Take Me Out" compares lovers to snipers aiming at each other. The lyrics begin: So if you're lonely, you know I'm here waiting for you I'm just a crosshair, I'm just a shot away from you Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos told NME it's about how you'd "rather be shot than continue the tension."

This was the second single for Franz Ferdinand, following "Darts of Pleasure," which was little-heard outside of Europe. For their name, the band took inspiration from a racehorse called "The Archduke Ferdinand." After seeing the horse race on TV they began to discuss Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose assassination triggered World War I. They decided it would be a good band name because of its sound and the implications of the Archduke's death.

Kapranos watched the 2001 war film Enemy At The Gates the night before the idea emerged for "Take Me Out." The Jean-Jacques Annaud-directed movie served as inspiration for the song. "It's set during the Second World War around the siege of Stalingrad. One of the themes of the film is this stand-off between two snipers," he explained in a Song Exploder podcast. "Jude Law is the Soviet sniper and Ed Harris is the evil Nazi. They're both kind of tucked away, hidden from each other, waiting for the other to make a move and expose themselves. 'Cause as soon as the other makes a move, the other will know where they are and will take them out." The next day, "while mucking about," Kapranos came up with what would eventually become "Take Me Out." "This image of the two snipers left quite an impact on me; it felt like a very good metaphor for the kind of romantic situations that we sometimes find ourselves in," he said. "You know, where you both know you're into the other but no one wants to kind of, like, expose their vulnerability and make a move, and let the other know how they feel. And so I could write [the song] so you can't really tell what I'm talking about. Am I talking about snipers or am I talking about some kind of romantic situation?"