Songfacts®:

• Monsters Of Folk were a side project for Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, and indie singer-songwriter M. Ward. The foursome originally got together in 2004 for a tour where they would take turns backing each other on their songs. After playing together both on-stage and backstage, they started working together on and off on various material, but because of other projects, it took five years for their self-titled debut album to be wrapped. "Dear God (sincerely M.O.F)" is the opening track from the album and holds up as their most popular song, with James, Oberst and Ward each taking a turn on lead vocals. The group returned to the studio in 2012 but weren't able to complete an album.
• The song is built around a sample of Trevor Dandy's 1970 gospel song "Is There Any Love." Rapper Kid Cudi sampled the same track on his song "Is there Any Love," which is on the deluxe version of his debut album, Man On The Moon: The End of the Day.
• Mike Mogis told Express Night Out about this song: "Connor played bass - we both did - I did a lot of keyboards. I tried to make things sound as if they were part of the loop, like a Wurlitzer line. [Though,] it got kind of spacey sounding, so, it didn't end up sounding like this part of the loop. [The sample] didn't dictate where the song went. I do think, though, that it created an R & B feel that we wanted embrace in keeping the arrangement sparse and vocal-heavy. I know the vocals have a beachy-esque quality to it, but it also has an R & B quality. It inspired that sort of direction. It didn't dictate what we did, but it put us in that direction. We kind of wanted that one to be a little trippy, sort of."
• The Monsters of Folk recorded a sequel to this song with Late Night With Jimmy Fallon's house band The Roots in 2010.
• This song asks the famous theological question, If God is loving and kind, why is there such suffering? Jim James of Monsters Of Folk explained to Under The Radar: "I'm one of those people that really believes that there is some force or some thing out there, but I don't know what it is. I just have never been able to subscribe to any particular religious set of beliefs. I just feel like I've been fortunate to have a lot of crazy, magical coincidences, and I've been unfortunate to have had some bad things happen, too, but I think everybody does. I just feel like there's too much going on out there for it all to be random or for us all just to be animals running around. I feel like there's too much magic and lack of coincidence."
• This is far from the first song called "Dear God." The most famous one was "released by XTC in 1986 and covers very similar material.
• According to Jim James, the group recorded the music first and then piled into a car, where they drove around listening to the track as they came up with lyrics.