Songfacts®:

• Also known as "Death Is My Sleezy Pay," this early entry from My Morning Jacket is a bleak ballad about depression sapping someone's will to live. Lead singer Jim James sings from the perspective of a man who is running out of ways to cope with his unfulfilling life. The last vestige of hope he has is the love of a woman, but as he notices her pulling away, he wonders if death is the easy way out of his predicament.
• My Morning Jacket were already a big deal in The Netherlands thanks to a successful European tour in support of their 1999 debut, The Tennessee Fire, but the album's successor, At Dawn, helped the Kentucky indie-rockers grow their fanbase in the US.
• The second album was recorded in the same manner as the first - the band converged at a farm owned by guitarist Johnny Quaid's grandparents in Shelbyville, Kentucky. They worked in a makeshift studio above a three-car garage they dubbed Above The Cadillac - a reference to Grandma Quaid's Caddy housed below. Most of Jim James' vocals were recorded in an empty grain silo, capturing a natural reverb that contributed to the band's signature sound on their early releases.
  
  While MMJ were pros when it came to performing onstage, they didn't know much about putting an album together. James told Under The Radar in 2017: "We were just so green and just such infants, we didn't really know anything about professional recording or anything like that, but we recorded it all ourselves and recorded it all to tape and just had a really amazing time out there."
  
  Luckily, their naivete worked in their favor. Fans and critics embraced the album's rough-around-the-edges sound, and it earned the band a record deal with the independent label ATO Records, founded by Dave Matthews.
• My Morning Jacket broke out of the folk-Americana box by experimenting with different genres, such as psychedelic rock and club music, on At Dawn and subsequent albums. But their early sonics were a winning formula for indie bands like Fleet Foxes and Band Of Horses that arrived in their wake. Watching those groups blow up made James wonder if MMJ should have stayed in the box a little bit longer.
  
  "I don't feel slighted when I see bands doing what we were doing back then getting so much more attention than we did then," James told The Guardian in a 2011 interview. "Fleet Foxes are a really talented band, they make beautiful music. But it's also f--kin' weird. Like, did we just not do it long enough? If we'd made one more record of harmonies and folk s--t, would the press have been, like, 'These guys are f--kin' gods!'?"