note from NNMaddox:
This was inspired by the movie Malcolm X. At the end, all of the kids, born many years after Malcolm's death all stand up and say "I AM MALCOLM X!". I think there's a little bit of Haig in everyone, of every race, every background.
Haig says:
Mike is making fun of how much I like David Bowie on this song. One night, he got drunk and kept saying "David Bowie" over and over. And there you have it.
NNMaddox: That's Dysan playing piano in the beginning too. A few months ago, I wanted him to do an intro for a song I wrote called "Court Jester". I never used it for that, but instead slowed down his original cartoonish piano solo and used it for this. Dysan read "Circling Swan Lake" unlike how Jimmy and I had envisioned it. He turned a lyric about a demented, insensitive man saying all the wrong things to capture a girls attention into a desperate, clueless high school kid reciting overzealous poetry to a girl that would never give him ten seconds of her time. It was performances like this one that made me realize that everyone had a different take on each Haig poem. This was a real treat, and really opened the doors on getting others involved.
NNMaddox:
Before I moved to New York, Dysan and I worked on a track I had written in 1998 about a person that was wasting their potential by being a hopeless drug addict. It was a song I was never able to capture the way I wanted to then, but I decided to bring it back for my album Cancer Alley. I was not only able to complete it for that, but I used the guitar track that Dysan did and put new lyrics to it. It was one of Jimmy's favorite songs of mine, and I think he'd be happy to see it on his album. Toward the end, I lift two lyrics, one from New Orleans metalhead Acid Bath, and one of the earliest known of Haig's.
"I met an angel with a sawed-off shotgun wanted by the FBI, we dropped some acid killed our parents, then we hit the road"-from Scream Of The Butterfly
"My dad once told me to get a girlfriend, so I did-AND BEAT HER SENSELESSLY"-Jimmy Haig