Wayne Note's from the Album:

While we were recording this track a bizarre murder suicide happened in Fredonia. Mary (Dave's wife) had come up to the studio and told us about how the I-90 underpass had closed because a man had leapt onto the highway right into the path of an eighteen wheeler doing 85 m.p.h. His body was literally splattered everywhere... They were still looking for bits and pieces.

So it is a strage story, and I may not be factually correct, but it goes something like this: A young women, a student at Fredonia University (where Dave Fridmann taught and our Priest Driven Ambulance record was done) is being stalked by her disturbed ex-boyfriend. The disturbed man follows her up to Niagra Falls (the city) and he abducts the girl and kills her new boyfriend... with a baseball bat, I believe. She is left tied up in a basement in Buffalo. He (this disturbed killer) is now in some kind of state of mind (we can only speculate as to what psychic break actually occured) that he sees suicide as his only option... and thus the lunge from the overpass into the speeding truck.

Our song had already been in the works for a couple of days and, upon hearing this story, I inserted certain lyrical and sonic elements of this desparate odyssey into it. In the beginning of the song, underneath the high, screaming voices, you can hear an actual recording of Niagra Falls... water rushing, crushing, relentless... The lyrics begin with a sense of curiousity but quickly turn bleak. (I believe this is another song about acceptance... but I would not argue that it sounds almost defeatist.) Why do giant wonderous things like stars in the sky burn out and die... Why does something so intimate and joyful like human love fade and die?? And finally... why do we die?? ...or even kill ourselves? Midway through the guitar solo you'll hear a truck rumble from left to right puncturing the soundscape, triggering an eruption of ghostly voices. This represents the moment the distraught ex-boyfriend is obliterated on the highway... but it is also a metaphor for the horrific instant awareness in all out lives, when internal analysis about the beauty and meaning of our life turns to fear and despair when, at last, we realize, that we ourselves are going to die. It can be a catastrphic psychological experience.