Songfacts®:

• If you hear something from "the horse's mouth," you're hearing it firsthand, from the source. If you don't, you could be getting bad information, or as Edie Brickell puts it in this song, "hearing it from a horse's ass."
  
  In a 2021 Songfacts interview with Brickell, she told the story behind the song: "Years and years and years ago, I think I was 20 years old and we were still playing in the clubs, and one of the local newspapers said something about our band that wasn't true. After that article came out we were really affected by it because when you're so young, you're unaccustomed to being written about, and certainly when somebody gets it wrong, it felt so crushing, and it was mildly insulting.
  
  We had a regular following, and a crowd of kids who were there to see us every show. And in between songs, in one of those impromptu moments, I said to our crowd, 'Hey, I know that they said this in the press, but it's not true, and if you don't hear it from the horse's mouth, you're hearing it from a horse's ass.' And we all fell out laughing."
• Outside of the New Bohemians, Brickell has been a part of many collaborations, including a band called the Gaddabouts, led by drummer Steve Gadd. Brickell recorded the first permutation of this song, called "The Horse's Mouth," for their 2012 album Look Out Now! She didn't think this jazzy version was fully realized, so a few years later she took the chorus to Willie Nelson, who loved it. Inspired, she went home and wrote a new version of the song, hoping Nelson would record it with her. They ended doing another song together called "Sing To Me Willie," so Brickell recorded "Horse's Mouth" with New Bohemians and issued it as part of their fifth album, Hunter And The Dog Star.