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Take a Picture

"Take a Picture"
Filter take a picture.png
Single by Filter
from the album Title of Record
Released November 16, 1999 (1999-11-16)
Format CD
Genre Alternative rock
Length

6:03 (album version)
4:20 (video version)

3:41 (radio edit)
Label Reprise
Writer(s) Richard Patrick
Producer(s)
  • Ben Grosse
  • Richard Patrick
  • Geno Lenardo
  • Rae DiLeo
Filter singles chronology
"Welcome to the Fold"
(1999)
"Take a Picture"
(1999)
"The Best Things"
(2000)

6:03 (album version)
4:20 (video version)

"Take a Picture" is a song by American alternative rock group Filter. It was released in November 1999 as the second single from their second album Title of Record. The song became a major hit during the start of 2000. It was the band's first departure from industrial rock.

Filter's frontman, and founding member Richard Patrick has said that the song is about him getting drunk on an airplane and taking off all of his clothes. Patrick expanded in greater detail in a 2008 retrospective interview:

"When I wrote the chorus to "Take a Picture" – 'Could you take my picture/’Cuz I won’t remember' – it was just after my friend was like, 'Do you remember anything you did last night?' And I was like, 'What are you talking about?' She said, “My god, you were throwing beer bottles out of a cab window at a cop car. Do you remember that?' And I said, 'Good lord, could you take my picture, ‘cuz I won’t remember.' And that line just kinda stuck. Weeks later, I had another drunken experience – being on a plane and being blacked out and not feeling good and taking my shirt off, half in and out of consciousness – and I’m in the back of a paddy wagon. I’m thinking, 'Oh my god, what is my dad gonna think of this s**t?' Y’know, ‘Dad, what do you think about your son now?’ So, the song is this amazing thing for me to look back on now."

Patrick's father was offended by this line, but Patrick explained to his father that each time he sings the line it has a different meaning because Patrick changes the tone in which he delivers the line each time it's sung.

The song was intended as a tribute to the Was (Not Was) song, "Dad, I'm In Jail", from their album What Up, Dog?.

A music video, directed by David Meyers, featured the band in a dreamlike sequence taking place in five different main scenes: a crashed and burning jet airplane in the middle of the ocean, underwater below it without scuba gear on, on a tiny search boat rowboat in the middle of the ocean, a room in a house being flooded by water, and on the roof of this flooding house.


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