This oddity, the only totally new track on DAYLIGHT KISSING NIGHT, has a very bizarre story. DAYLIGHT KISSING NIGHT was supposed to up the production values and serve as a calling card for my songwriting for a new audience. It was tricky because I had to go through a lot of eras and also figure out how to cram as many songs as possible onto the disc. Many tracks got discarded because the recordings weren't up to snuff, or were remixed, re-edited, edited, and rerecorded, and we were constantly reshuffling the track sequence to get the best possible album.

In the end, almost nothing from the Cassell-Hazley era made the cut, mainly because the production and performances on the old albums were so messy and chaotic (though cool in their own right), and my vocals so raw, they just didn't fit with the rest of it. DAYLIGHT KISSING NIGHT was to be a songwriting and not a band showcase, and the vocals all had to be tight, and so we needed a more polished sound for those tracks. I wound up rerecording three old songs with the Chaos Band, which were generally well-accepted, though there were grumblings about the neo-soul rearrangement of "At The Bookstore."

Anyway at some point it became evident that we needed a bit more rock 'n' roll in the mix, and also the NEVEREST album was underrepresented in the final lineup, but there wasn't room for much - maybe two minutes tops. So I came upon the odd idea to restrospectively write a song as if it was to have been on NEVEREST, and record this song to balance out DAYLIGHT KISSING NIGHT.

This was a very weird exercise, because my whole way of doing things had changed in ten years. Thinking back on what I wrote and how I wrote in those days, I obsessed over lyrics that would be crammed with wordplay too dense for anyone to really follow and with a vocal that was just a little bit out of my range, particularly on the bridge. The story, about a girlfriend urging her boyfriend to slow down and take a breather, also reflects where my life was at at that time and makes sense out of the title.

Anyway, it all more or less worked out but it must have been a spur of the moment thing because I have a recollection of starting to play the track at Steve Refling's place and then putting out a call to all of the Chaos Band that the session was happening now and anyone who could make it was welcome to play on it. Only Teresa showed up, and when it came time to do the signature gonzo Cockeyed Ghost era Adam Marsland guitar solo, it turned out that I now knew too much to really come up with one. Steve Refling also tried and failed, and then came up with an elegant solution: he handed the guitar to Teresa (who doesn't really play), pointed her fingers at the right frets, and hit record. So Teresa plays lead guitar on this track, the only time that has ever happened (I think she plays bass on it too. I did the drums and rhythm guitar).

The meaning behind the song is a little eerie in that, of course, I was talking partly tomyself, but my own brother would drop dead just a few months later, the first of many signs that I needed to start putting a brake on things.