Songfacts®:

• The concept for Nick Waterhouse's sixth studio album, The Fooler, was inspired by a visit to San Francisco during the pandemic. Over a decade earlier, the singer-songwriter began his career there while he was working at a record store, and he came back to make sure his elderly former boss had enough food and supplies to withstand the global crisis.
  
  The city had changed a lot during his absence due to gentrification, and most of his old haunts were gone. As he walked the empty streets during lockdown, he realized all he had left were his memories of a place that no longer existed.
  
  In a 2023 Songfacts interview, Waterhouse recalled how the idea for the title track came to him:
  
  "It was one free afternoon I had when I was going for a walk. It struck me how desolate and surreal the street felt, and it was the street that I used to live on. I had this chorus:
  
  Hot and cold
  Cool and cooler
  I am the fool
  And you are the fooler
  
  before that, but the verses really crystallized, and I understood this notion of the chase and the push and pull of what could be a love or an interpersonal relationship. It clicked, and I entered this overlay of seeing a lot of my younger life on that street. That was where a lot of these songs ended up coming from. But I was feeling out where I wanted to go with the storytelling, and it was not a personal way of storytelling. It was the way fiction would work, almost like a musical novel."
• So who exactly is The Fooler? Waterhouse told Songfacts: "You are the fooler. The fooler is the human memory and the human heart. Just like every good joker, it's there to entertain you and poke you in places that are tender. It's a red herring thinking it's an insult to someone else, and the reality is, the fooler is inside of you. The answer is in that other verse. Sometimes reverie is not your friend, and that's who the fooler is."