1984Released
5:48

Did You Know?

Interesting facts and trivia about The Killing Moon. By Songfacts®.

The meaning of this song is rather fluid, even to Echo lead singer Ian McCulloch, who wrote the lyric. "It sounds vaguer than it actually is," he said in a Songfacts interview. "I never really tell people what the meaning is to all the songs because that surely spoils their journey. When they listen to something like 'The Killing Moon,' there are so many different ideas of what that is about. To me it's like to be or not to be moments." The song has had a rather profound effect on him. He added: "I've been on the moon that is 'The Killing Moon.' No one else has really been on that moon because I sing it as I wrote it. It's my moon now. Not the one up in the sky, but 'The Killing Moon' is my moon - I know everything about it. I feel it from day to day, but it changes all the time. Every now and then and I go, 'Wow! That was like some kind of scripture for me, that song.' It doesn't mean it's about God, but it's my parable that I had to write for myself first, but it seems lots of people see 'The Killing Moon' as a special song."

This was recorded at Crescent Studio in Bath, Somerset. After catching a cold, frontman Ian McCulloch completed the recording of his vocals at Amazon Studio in Liverpool, where Pete de Freitas also completed the drumming.

In a Songfacts interview with Echo guitarist Will Sergeant, he explained how this song came together: "We'd all been given acoustic guitars by Washburn and we were all playing around with them, so the album was heading to a more acoustic world. I was going over to Mac's house - we had a 4-track there and we were just coming up with riffs and chord sequences and stuff like that. 'The Killing Moon' was one of them, and it just sort of developed. It was pretty different than the recorded version at the time. I think that the recorded version took it to a another level, really. It had some interesting sounds on it, like reversed autoharps in the choruses and things like that."

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Song Analysis

Key, BPM (tempo) and time signature of The Killing Moon.
GKey
MajorMode
4/4Time Signature
124BPM

Album

The album The Killing Moon is released on.

Released By

The record label that has released The Killing Moon.
WM UK
© 2003 Warner Music UK Ltd
℗ 1984 This Re-issue / Compilation (P) 1984 & 2003 Warner Music UK Ltd

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