Wayne's Notes from the Album:

"'The Captain' is the song and recording that crystallized the vision of what The Soft Bulletin would become. If there was one song that signaled a radical change in our conciousness this (to us anyway) would be it . . . We had been challenged, and perhaps even defeated, at times during the process of making Zaireeka. But we had also expanded our skills, our patience and our perspective of what now could be possible. So we sat down, with some enthusiasm, to do this dramatic song, 'The Captain,' in which, within the framework of the song, the singer (the narrator of the story) arrives at a new consciousness... and, in essence, it is possibly our NEW self killing off our OLD self... (in the song the ship's doctor realizes the captain is a cold hearted and egotistical fool... and instead of letting the crew die or be killed because of his, the captain's, small-mindedness and self-importance... he, the ship's doctor, decides to kill him). The majestic layers of distorted brass and timpani, at the end of the song, perfectly fitted and expressed this internal jouney... A man goes inside himself ready to destroy and change whatever does not accommodate his new consciousness... A man reinventing himself from the outside-in... as, I think, we were struggling to do. We did not know what we would find when we set off into the unknown. But perhaps, like this song, we journeyed inside ourselves..."

Wayne's quote from Staring At Sound:

"I had this idea that this captain guy wasn't listening to the ship's doctor, who was saying, 'I know we've got this journey, but this devoted crewman is too ill, and we need to stop.' The crew members have all given their lives to this captain, because they trust him, but when he doesn't stop for this other guy, their attitude changes. I think somewhere in there was this inner story of whatever it was that I was doing at the time, and me worrying about whether I was worthy of these people's devotion, or if it would turn into some kind of Apocalypse Now scenario where I would wind up getting my throat cut . . . A lot of times before, you would lay down ten tracks on a song, and it would be pretty good, but you'd lay down five more, and it would ruin the whole thing. But when we did 'The Captain,' even if we did a hundred tracks, it just got bigger and bigger and better and better, and as it piled up, it became this monstrous pyramid with laser beams shooting out the top. We'd bring people in and say, 'Can you believe this? We just did it with keyboards!' Even six months earlier, we couldn't have done a song like that, but after we had done 'The Captain,' we were off on our own trip."

According to Kliph, "The Captain Is A Cold Hearted And Egotistical Fool" was ultimately not included on The Soft Bulletin because Wayne and Steven felt its intro too closely mirrored that of "The Gash," and they didn't want both songs on the same album. It was released on The Soft Bulletin Companion promo.