I Turn My Camera On

Spoon drummer Jim Eno explained to Three Monkeys Online the genesis of this song being so different from the other tracks on the album: "Britt had a demo CD of the song, and we were on tour somewhere. I popped it on in the van and we were listening to it, and I was hearing this Prince dance-thing, you know - with the upbeat hi-hat and real funky feel to it. We tried it a couple of different ways, but that worked the best. With the vocal melody, that was already there. The falsetto vocals were already there, which maybe made me think of that kind of rhythmic pattern at the start. It's hard to explain how the ideas come about. Sometimes you hear something, and realize that a certain approach will work really well. I think, with that song, Britt originally wanted to do it as a rock song, but the other approach really worked well."

Of the song's meaning, Spoon frontman Britt Daniel told NPR: "This song is about emotional distance, maybe. The idea of instead of engaging with the world you're holding a camera up which, a) puts a camera in front of your face, and b) puts some distance between you and the outside world. And you're sort of documenting the world. It was one of the last songs I wrote before we started to record, but it was the first song we started with. So once we had this basic track, I thought, 'Okay, we have a single for this record.' The words that rang true to me were the, 'You made me untouchable for life and you wasn't polite.' I was thinking about people in the past who might have led me down that path. I don't think I'm untouchable. But sometimes I've felt that way. [But this song] was in falsetto, it was a dance-y, soul approach that we don't do very often."

This samples a distortion sound from the end of Spoon's "30 Gallon Tank," a noise Daniel says "was an accident I did on a four-track."