Songfacts®:

• In this yearning ballad, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James imagines a romance with a pretty librarian that he can't muster the courage to approach. It's an all-too-familiar scenario for the singer in real life.
  
  "I'm a shy guy, and I happen to be single at the moment, so if I see somebody I'm attracted to, it'll become a fantasy for me to wonder what it would be like to have a real relationship with them," he told Dallas News in 2008.
• In the lyrics, James tries to spruce up in the bathroom before he sees the librarian and laments over God giving us mirrors to judge our own reflections. When he finally spots the librarian, he notices she's listening to Karen Carpenter "singin' in the rain" (likely a reference to the Carpenters' 1971 song "Rainy Days And Mondays"), and remembers how Carpenter was "another lovely victim of the mirror's evil way."
  
  Carpenter was just 32 when she died of heart failure due to years of struggling with anorexia.
• James was actually in a relationship when he wrote the songs on Evil Urges, but it ended just as the band started recording the album.
  
  "I'd met this person who was really fantastic, and I got this wall of love that I hadn't felt in awhile, and it brought out a lot of emotions," he told Rolling Stone in 2008. "But it didn't work out. By the time we made the album, shit was falling apart. I was singing these really happy songs from a really sad place."
• MMJ drummer Patrick Hallahan had his work cut out for him on the album, which regularly pushed him outside of his comfort zone. "I am most comfortable when I'm rocking," he told Drum Magazine.
  
  On synth-ruled tracks like the two-part "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream" and "Highly Suspicious," that meant recreating the tight mechanical beats of a drum machine, but on a song like "Librarian," he had to learn to use restraint.
  
  "Holding back and being sweet - that was fantastic to figure out those parameters," he continued. "Where I needed to not be. It takes me out of my element."
• The gentle acoustic ballad represents one aspect of the genre-fluid album, which was largely influenced by soul music and subgenres of rock and funk that were outside of My Morning Jacket's standard Southern and psychedelic-rock sensibilities. While Evil Urges was polarizing among fans and critics, it earned the band a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album at the 2009 Grammy Awards.