“It came about because I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights," says Marker. "I was staying at this really loud apartment in Hollywood, and I got up early one morning in a somewhat psychotic state – and the song was just there.
“I had Pro Tools on my laptop, so I grabbed an acoustic guitar and banged it out really fast – not the whole thing, but the gist of it. I e-mailed it to everybody else and went back to sleep. It all happened within the space of 20 minutes.
“Everything gets changed once we get into the studio. Butch had the idea to make the intro verse a little like the New York band Suicide, using some cheap keyboards. Then it goes into a big guitar thing – that all happened with the four of us together in the studio. For lyrics, I just had a couple of lines; Shirley ran with it and fleshed it all out.
“There’s some really weird guitars that sound almost like keyboards. I did some of those at home with a Guild Bluesbird. I’m playing slide – using a lot of compression it gets a real synth sound. We have some normal-sounding guitars, too, some Teles that we played in the studio.”