It's pretty much an axiom for GO WEST that of the newly-written songs, the earlier they came, the longer they took to write. It usually takes me a while to get back in the songwriting groove and I was working on "Lied" for a lot of 2005 and finally finished it up in '06. It was the first of the new songs to be worked up by the band and as soon as we had it together we knew it was special. It quickly became one of the most popular songs the band played live, and it's only one of two songs from GO WEST that was a regular consistent part of the playlist prior to the album coming out ("Burn Down The World" was the other). Most of the delay was in the lyrics -- the music, based on a traditional Irish melody, wasn't particularly original -- and I was really pleased with the moral ambiguity expressed in the song...the idea that just because you straighten up and fly right, doesn't mean people are going to like you. You may actually just piss them off. As the kickoff of disc two of GO WEST, it's about turning over a new leaf, growing up, and expecting everything will go smoothly -- but it doesn't (which theme is repeated over and over again as the songs progress through disc two). For me personally, the song had a lot to do with the grief over the bad ending of a long and heartfelt off-on relationship and about how having reformed the sexually reckless ways sung about in YOU DON'T KNOW ME hadn't necessarily made life easier or happier.

We knew this was a key track from the get-go and because of that, we wound up tackling it surprisingly late in the recording process. There was talk for a while of going to Colorado and recording it with Ed Stasium, but we decided it would be cost-prohibitive and finally we just cut it the normal way. Despite having played it live many times, it wasn't one of the better performances on the album to begin with ("Burn Down The World" ironically had similar problems as well, with two stabs at the basic track before we got it right). This was probably partly due to me not communicating the Pixies-like vibe to the band very well, and the required playing style being a little out of everyone's comfort zone. We all were a little spooked by it too, knowing that of all the songs on the album this was the one everyone had been waiting to hear and we didn't want to blow it. Once we finally had it about where we wanted it, we still couldn't get the finished product to sound right. Several failed mixes later we turned it over to Earle Mankey, who did a slamming mix that blew everyone away, turning one of the best songs on the album into one of the best sounding songs as well.

Earle deserves a lot of the credit for the final product but there are good performances on the track, particularly vocally -- Evie's unison vocals to the lead and Teresa's star turn on the third verse. I had one good bit cut during my bronchitis attack -- a throat-wrenching heavy metal scream that wails over the guitar solo, which I also slaved over for five hours straight to get the right sound without overdoing the distortion. Kurt's tambourine playing, emphasized by Earle in the mix, is a surprise secret weapon.

The song's Pixies influence is obvious, but I've always wanted to write a song with Joe Nolte of the seminal California punk band The Last, a longtime friend, and with this song's brutal honesty and Irish flavor, it's somewhat inspired by them too. This song is the first preview track from GO WEST, released concurrently in July 2009 with a video directed and conceived by Mike Schnee, better known as Chissum Worthington of the L.A. punk band Pussy Cow.