Songfacts®:

• The Canadian singer-songwriter had written this tune in 2007 when he was on his first American tour.
  
  In our 2016 interview with Dan Mangan, he described the stressful adventure that inspired this song. "I was illegally playing shows in the States and didn't have a visa or anything," he said. "I drove my mom's Subaru down there. I was making 30 dollars a show.
  
  I had gone down totally alone, driving for a week straight trying to get to South By Southwest where I had this showcase. I was young and South By Southwest was such a huge deal. I was so certain that I was going to get discovered there [laughs]. Everything was going to change if I could just get to this showcase.
  
  I hit this horrible patch of weather after 10 hours of driving. It was getting late, I was in west Texas around El Paso, and I still had so much driving to do. I pulled over to a Motel 6 and got four hours of sleep and then I got back into the car and started driving again. After you've been driving alone for six straight days for 10 hours a day, you're slapping yourself in the face to stay awake. You're trying to sing really loud songs to keep yourself engaged. You go a little bit insane.
  
  I remember there was this terrible storm going on and the windshield wipers were going mad. I started to worry that I was going to get swallowed up in a tornado, so I started going, 'I know tornados are in Kansas because I've seen The Wizard of Oz, but do they happen in Texas too? I can't remember!' So it was just having this experience of being out there and being crazy and just totally being at my wits' end in the pursuit of this fantastical dream of being a professional musician.
  
  I was in the car where the lines came to me:
  
  We drive until the gas is gone
  And then walk until our feet are torn
  Crawl until we feed the soil
  Film the whole thing
  
  So it's a cheeky thing. Here we are out on the road. We're supposed to be having this fantastical time and we're going to film it all so we can put it on the web and people can see it.
  
  The whole thing is such a weird and ridiculous thing, but that song came directly out of that experience."
• In the liner notes for his sophomore album Nice, Nice, Very Nice, Mangan wrote about this tune: "In March of 2007, driving from El Paso to Austin, I drank 64 ounces of cheap gas-station coffee in a day; it was disgusting."
  
  The third verse depicts Mangan's massive consumption of the caffeinated beverage:
  
  So I've gotten used to coffee sweats
  Still getting used to road regrets
  And hell I took you up on all your threats to leave
• One of Mangan's most misinterpreted lyrics in his entire discography comes from this song. He sings in the sixth verse, "See, the cost is more than what you get paid," but people often misquote that line as, "The gas is more than what you get paid."
  
  Mangan told us how he thinks the misheard lyric fits more with this tune. "It's kind of a better lyric. If people are rewriting it or singing it that way, it makes more sense. You're like after the fact, 'Oh, maybe I should have done it that way.' It's funny."