Songfacts®:

• Fronted by sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell, Larkin Poe is a blues-rock band based in Nashville, Tennessee. Their tune "Mad As A Hatter" was a popular concert staple that finally got recorded when they collaborated with the hybrid chamber orchestra Nu Deco Ensemble. The two acts paired up for a livestream from Miami's North Beach Bandshell during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to release their performance as a live album: Paint The Roses.
• The track was inspired by Megan and Rebecca's paternal grandfather, who struggled with mental illness for several years before finally being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Rebecca sings about watching a loved one's mind slip away and wondering if the same fate awaits her:
  
  Just like the father of my father, time stole his mind
  And I can't forget that one-fourth of his blood is mine
  I try not to worry
• The sisters wrote this 10 years before they recorded it. In a 2022 Songfacts Podcast interview, Megan explained how writing the song helped her process her feelings about her family history. She said, "From my own journey in writing the song, knowing that mental illness ran in our family and having a bit of an understanding of how challenging it was for our grandfather to live the majority of his life without a diagnosis, there was a lot of mystery and a lot of unanswered questions that the whole family was processing. It created some unrest that I needed to address in writing the song. It served as a great release for me individually and has served as a great connective tissue between us and our fans over the years."
• Nu Deco Ensemble founder Jacomo Bairos was initially hesitant about joining forces with Larkin Poe because their sound could mesh with an orchestra.
  
  "They were the first blues-rock duo/group that we had ever collaborated with, so there were some hesitations for me in the beginning, wondering how that kind of sound, that kind of volume, can work with the orchestra because the orchestra is acoustic," He told Songfacts. "We have strings, violins, woodwinds, brass, and we amplify everybody. We have a certain sound before us and we even have a rhythm section. But even so, there's a nuance that goes back and forth between all artists on stage, and I was curious if it was going to work with metallic sounds, rock sounds, lap steels, the whole thing. Well, they got up on stage and about 20 seconds in, I looked around, and it was like, 'This is going to be great.' They just got it. They got the whole experience. They have a background in classical music in their early education that supports the idea of playing with an orchestra. It was so beautiful and they knew how to nuance what they did with what we did, and we knew how to blend in with them."
• "Mad as a hatter" is a colloquial phrase used to describe an eccentric or unstable person. The saying was prevalent in the 18th and 19th centuries, when hat makers used mercury nitrate in their work and suffered physical and mental ailments after prolonged exposure to the toxic substance.
• The Mad Hatter is also a character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland. The outro lyrics reference the 1865 children's novel, which also inspired the album title:
  
  Off with her head, off with her head...
  Paint the roses, paint the roses...
  
  "Off with her head," is a reference to the volatile Queen of Hearts' signature command. In chapter 8, she also forced her subjects to paint white roses red because she thought it was a better color.