Songfacts®:

• Placebo frontman Brian Molko says "Sleeping With Ghosts," the title track from the band's fourth studio album, was inspired by "a crazy American psychologist who believes in the cliché of eternal love. He thought two of his patients were soulmates who’d been reincarnated through many previous lives."
• The album finds Placebo revisiting the ghosts of relationships past. Molko told the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles of the theme: "I wanted to explore the relationship between the present and memory. All of us sleep with ghosts from the past, we carry them with us and they have a permanent effect on our daily lives. These ghosts embody all the people we loved, who have been important in our lives, who have changed us. While a lot of people spend their lives in therapy to manage them, I have the chance to carry them through music."
• Writing about his more difficult relationships was a cathartic process for Molko. He explained in a 2003 interview: "In a way writing the songs helps me to get a lot of the nasty feelings off my chest and put them in a box, and therefore have a bit more of an objective discourse with those emotions because you've done something positive with them, you've rid yourself of them."
• With the help of producer Jim Abbiss, who helmed Massive Attack's Protection album, Placebo brought in electronic elements to supplement their guitar-rock foundation on Sleeping With Ghosts. Molko told Vice in 2017: "This album is a bit of a wild card. I actually like this record because it's one of most sonically daring and electronic sounding records. It's the perfect mixture of what we were trying to do, which was fuse our sound with vintage synthesizers and old school analog recording techniques. It was around that time that Stefan [Olsdal, bassist] and I began our obsession with old synthesizers, and we just couldn't stop collecting. A vintage synth is a very guilty pleasure for us. We find them very sexy and irresistible to buy if we see one, even if we don't need it."