“Well, emotionally, it was written as the result of some argument that was resolved between Alannah [girlfriend, then wife, then ex-wife – Ed] and myself. We actually decided, well, this is an interesting emotional subject. What it feels like to get back together again after separation and the kind of ideas that come up and the way that emotion and physicality somehow are brought together.”Tom Bailey (455)

“”Sister of Mercy” is a favorite song of mine, and that comes from a news item. We’d heard about someone going through the tragedy of a murder, and yet having murdered someone, but the court – and this took place in France – the court decided that it was something called a “crime of passion,” and therefore couldn’t be tried on the same basis of a regular homicidal murder. We started talking about this in an intellectual political sense, and then realized it would be a great subject for a song, and a very difficult one, as well. The subject is domestic abuse, domestic violence, and yet it just seemed to be part of everyone’s life. To deny it would be would be too scared.”Tom Bailey (455)

“We were interested in the idea of group rituals of that sort [healing festivals – Ed], and particularly how it relates to artist, performer, and audience. And of course we’re not the first people to make use of that. Many, many, many artists have employed those kind of ideas, so it’s not specifically biblical. It’s non-specifically religious. It looks at religious ritual in that way, and then draws a kind of metaphor – I’ve always been very fond of the kind of layered metaphor where the song can be about one thing but also about another. That’s part of a really ancient and noble tradition of religious writing of music. Typically, people talk about their love for God in a religious song, but what they’re also saying is that they love someone human. It’s a way of evoking that immense emotional weight into a song.”Tom Bailey (455)

“It’s actually a complicated and quite dark song. It’s about discovering that your girlfriend or boyfriend wants to experiment with a relationship in a much deeper or broader sense than you were prepared to do. And so it drags you into this kind of helpless feeling of being lost, helplessly in love, but taking some kind of confidence from the fact that love will help you through those difficult situations. So it’s a naïve and complicated song.”Tom Bailey (455)

“It’s about the lies that we’re told by the media and the politicians and so on and so forth, and how we make sense of that and how we have a responsibility to figure it out. And yet, it’s a very playful, funny, kind of quirky song. It’s not super serious, although its subject matter is quite weighty.”Tom Bailey (455)

“Everything we do is political, that’s a really important thing about us, but it’s politics with a small ‘p’. Everything must have a meaning, a reason, some importance to it — from writing a song to just… walking around.”Tom Bailey (871)