Songfacts®:

• When Songfacts asked Procol Harum's singer/composer/pianist Gary Brooker about his most difficult song to perform, he said: "We've got one called 'The Thin End Of The Wedge,' which was on Exotic Birds and Fruit, which is, for some reason, a quite difficult piece to play and get the vocal across. I mean, if you heard it, you'd probably see why. But when I write a tune, I'm able to sing it, so I haven't written something that I can't sing. Nothing is really that difficult. I mean, it's easy sometimes because all you've got to do is put yourself into it. Some songs I must have sung thousands of times. Of course, they've been around for 40 years, you know. 'The Salty Dog' or 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale' or anything, but I always put myself into them, the lyrics are interesting enough that every time you sing them you can always, if you feel like it, just think of it in a different way, as you are vocalizing."
• Exotic Birds and Fruit was the band's eighth album, and it used a painting by the 17th century artist Jacob Bogdani on the album cover. Bogdani specialized in paintings of exotic birds, and the image was meant to signal the strangely exotic nature of the album.