Songfacts®:

• In this soulful love song, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James thanks a special person for breaking down his emotional walls and exposing the naked heart underneath. James was high on love when he wrote the songs on Evil Urges, but unfortunately his relationship wasn't built to last - it fell apart before the band recorded the album.
  
  In a 2008 interview with American Songwriter, James explained how his romantic woes add layers of complexity to the deceptively happy songs on the release. "A lot of the songs come from a really positive place, but I was bummed out when I was actually recording them. It's something that's happened a lot, because I haven't been able to keep a relationship for longer than a little while," he admitted. "I'm not glad it's that way, but I think it makes the songs more unique, because I'm not necessarily coming from just one place. I'm not coming from the 'I'm in love and I love you' place, or a totally 'f--k love, f--k life, I hate all this shit' place. I'm able to come at it in a few different ways."
• Evil Urges finds the indie rockers experimenting with several different genres, with soul music, in particular, being a big influence. According to James, singers like Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye can tap into an emotional and physical place that isn't as accessible in folk and rock music.
  
  "That stuff has always been really important to me because I think it's cool to see music that is really emotionally and spiritually fulfilling but that makes you want to move your body, too. I love folk music, but I think that’s something that it lacks. With some folk music - and maybe rock music, too - you can get into a real cerebral place, but you don't necessarily want to physically move to it. You just want to sit in your bed and cry," he explained in a 2008 interview with Under The Radar. "But I've been trying to get into music that resonates emotionally but with an uplifting power that also makes me want to jump around the apartment."
• For the album's swirling string arrangements, producer Joe Chiccarelli enlisted David Campbell (father of mononymous singer-songwriter Beck), whom he previously worked with on projects for Poco and Ricky Martin. Chiccarelli and Campbell set up the orchestra, including horn players, in the spacious A live room at Avatar Studios in Manhattan.
  
  "It's perfect for horns and strings," Chiccarelli told EQ Magazine in 2008. "The room is so live. I close-miked the horns with Shure 12As, put four U67s a few feet further out, and then used a Royer SF-12 stereo ribbon for the room."
  
  But the vast space also posed a problem for the producer. "In that 'open' of a room, the horns were too wet. They would have stuck out too much no matter how you mixed them. I ended up putting baffles around the performers to tighten the sound up and focus the strings into the mics," he continued.
  
  To capture the strings, he set up an AKG C24 stereo mic in the center of the room and mounted two vintage Neumann M50s above Campbell's head. "Some songs needed tighter, smaller string sounds and others wanted to be more grand and symphonic. I would change the balance between the wider-sounding M50s and the tighter-sounding C24 depending on what was most appropriate," he explained.