Originally entitled "Burn Out," my initial idea was to have a song similar to the Ramones, but the song wound up containing so many byzantine key and chord changes that it was almost impossible to keep straight which was which (the song drifts back and forth between B, C and C# almost randomly). The Ramones would have never bothered. The words to this song were written in the van on the way to a gig in Phoenix; it was among the last songs written for the album and was self-consciously the most punk-oriented song on a comparatively (to the prior CG albums) mellow record.

This is, of course, the song that deals with the collapse of the Big Deal label and what had happened to us in the time since we'd disappeared in '99. The lead vocal is passed between me, Robert and Severo with each person picking up the story chronologically at the point they joined the band. I don't have much to add to it...it's pretty much exactly how it went down, right down to the name of the lawyer, Nancy J. Wenger, who helped extricate us from the mess we were in (although we never actually filed a writ). Getting the rights back to my masters was one of my proudest-ever moments. The legalities of the Big Deal dissolution were complicated and one of the parties was refusing to even talk to us. I found a clause in our contract (it's the one, for your industry lawyers out there, that automatically exercises an option period if the label forgets to overtly do so) normally used to screw musicians and suggested that if we were clever about it we could do some jujitsu with it and turn it around back on the people that weren't answering our calls. Nancy took that idea and ran with it, and within a week we had everything back. Given our experience, I was really tickled by that.

I actually feel positively about the Big Deal experience as a whole. There were some things about being signed that were frustrating, but on the balance, I preferred it to not being signed. What really pissed me off about the whole thing was in the closing days, when peoples' livelihoods were hanging in the balance, there were people deliberately lying to us and messing with our lives. I thought that was fucked up, frankly. But whatever our disagreements, we owe the gang at Big Deal a lot and even though we never quite got the big push from them (they were gearing up for it with SCAPEGOAT) most of our three year run with them they treated us pretty well.

When this song came out on 232 DAYS ON THE ROAD, the pressing plant broke the two sections of the song title into different song IDs, meaning half the songs on the album were wrongly ID'd, which played havoc with our attempts to get the album played on college radio.

By the way, the title of the song arises from an industry practice of recalling and destroying all the unsold copies of an artist's albums when the label goes under. Which happily, didn't actually happen in our case...a sympathetic Big Deal employee smuggled them out to us, and I sold every last one of them on the road.