John: This was an attempt on my part to use some elements of "techno" in our songs. Techno songs usually repeat the same 4 or 8 chords over and over again, and to me it gets kind of boring after a while (I think of it as the song not going anywhere, you're always waiting for the chorus to kick in). I thought if I could come up with a 16 chord progression and repeat it over and over again, I might be able to hold the listener's interest. We then used a dance oriented drum loop, and big fat pads to fill it out. The trick was, on each repetition, to introduce something new in the solo instruments that would sound like the song was going somewhere. I wrote some really lame lyrics for it, which Rog mercifully fixed, that rhymed at the same places that the chord progression "rhymed". Originally there wasn't going to be any singing at all, just some spoken "poetry", but when I came up with the vocal melody (which was just going to be used on piano) it sounded so good I decided we had to sing it. Brian's guitar work is a big part of the song, but Brian never really played it the way it ended up. I had Brian just noodle around on the guitar, with no rehearsal whatsoever, with the chords playing, for about ten times longer than the song lasts. Then we picked the parts we liked best and spliced them together. Come to think of it, we did many takes on nearly all the parts, and then culled the best ones for the final mix, but I think on this song we went overboard. It took forever.
Rog: This is John’s personal epic through and through. The music is all his. Greg played the electric guitar bit we use at the beginning and the end and under the vocal melody, but the main guitar solo was all Brian McCulloch, who did a wonderful job. I played the acoustic guitars. Originally, this song had a whole different set of lyrics that I wrote, which were going to be done as a spoken word piece. At some point, John came up with words and a melody to add in for a few stanzas. I changed his words around a bit to match my theme from the spoken verses. When we started recording the vocals, we quickly noticed how cheesy the spoken word bits I wrote sounded, so they were history. Luckily, we still had John’s sung bits, which created a great change in tone midway through the song. You think the whole thing is going to be an instrumental, and then suddenly you get these subdued vocals, which John wanted to sound just like another instrument in the mix.