This is another one of those half-baked ideas I came to the studio with which I made into an actual song with my producer. I had recorded a scratch version (0.0) which was over 12 minutes long. I had to cut out about half of the lyrics, and several entire sections of the song to get it down to a reasonable length. Steve and I recorded version 1.0 in 02/97. When I was sequencing the album, I had the idea for the screaming women in verse 4. I recorded some arguments in some movies I have at home, and added them in, calling that version 1.1.

I didn't start working on this album with the idea of having a "ballad" on it, but that's what happened. I'm just glad it's not a "love ballad". It is however, a very sad song. Anyone who is in the position of the subject of the song will know what it's about. I've lost people to this.

The character singing this song is not just afraid for the subject, he feels locked out of her world. That's a bad feeling, even if it's a world you'd never want to inhabit.

This track ALSO shows the great joy of owning Sound Forge 4.0: The crunchy weirdness on "iodine stretch" was accomplished by tossing the vocal tracks over to the computer, using Sound Forge to mess them up, and then running them back out onto tape. I ran a very low-quality time-compression down to 25%, and then stretched them back to normal length at equally low quality. A 900hz pitch modulation finished the effect. Steve is playing the guitar in verse 4. I included the screaming women there to augment the growing sense of out-of-control-ness in the subject of the lyrics.