Songfacts®:

• King's X lead singer Dug Pinnick had a warehouse of wisdom to draw from when making the Three Sides Of One album - he was 70 years old when they were working on it. In "Flood Pt. 1" he's less idealistic than he used to be, ready to write some people off instead of trying to redeem them.
  
  "I'm a problem solver – I always want to see both sides and figure out what the truth is, and make my own conclusion," he told Songfacts in a track by track for the album. "And my conclusion about mankind is, we need a flood. I used to think all we needed was love, but I realize now that there are people that aren't capable of love and don't have that feeling. They say 40% of humans don't have empathy. So, why am I singing about everybody needs love? It's clearly not the answer. And I thought, Well, maybe what we need is a flood – just reset it."
• The song was much longer when it started, but the band cut it down to 3:03 and named it "Flood Pt. 1" because that's only part of the song. "Flood Pt. 2" exists as an outtake.
• Dug Pinnick cites the metal band Meshuggah as an inspiration for this song, along with another musical influence that is more surprising: the song "Our House" by Madness.
• That's Jenny Takamatsu on violin. She's played on tracks by Randy Newman, Barry Manilow, Mary J. Blige and many others. On cello is Vanessa Freebairn-Smith of the Sonus Quartet.
• The album was produced by Michael Parnin and done with analog recording equipment (it was edited digitally in Pro Tools). "When it was mastered, it was mastered with tape saturation and tube EQs," Dug Pinnick told Songfacts. "So, everything is completely analog the best we could make it, and we did it because we knew it was going to be out on record. We thought about records more than anything. We didn't think of CDs or streaming. It was all about making a great sounding record."