Songfacts®:

• This song is about a very intense love/hate relationship Puddle Of Mudd lead singer Wes Scantlin had with an ex-girlfriend. He couldn't control her and she couldn't control him, which made it very combustible.
  
  "She would do crazy things that would hurt me," he told MTV. "There was no way I could control her, but at the same time the intimate part of the relationship was totally off the hook. I was kind of blind to the whole situation I was in because the sex was so great. Then one day I woke up and just went, 'Man, I can't do this anymore, and you're just not the one for me, so you gotta go. Bye-bye.'"
• A line you're likely to remember from this song is "I love the way you smack my ass." Wes Scantlin spent a lot of time with strippers and had a girlfriend who worked at a Kansas City club called Bazooka's Showgirls. She would tell her customers, "I love the way you smack my ass," which was kind of her catch phrase, so Scantlin put it into the song.
• "Control" was Puddle Of Mudd's first single. It was released on Fred Durst's label, Flawless Records.
  
  The band was broken up in 1999 when Wes Scantlin threw a proverbial Hail Mary by sneaking backstage at Limp Bizkit's Kansas City tour stop and delivering a demo tape to Durst's bodyguard. Scantlin was in the process of relocating to New Orleans when he got word that Durst was interested. Unfortunately, his bandmates were frozen out of the deal, so Flawless Records teamed Scantlin with new musicians who became Puddle Of Mudd.
• Scantlin wrote this song with Brad Stewart, who later joined the bands Shinedown and Saliva. Stewart was brought in to a songwriting session with the band, which included Paul Phillips on guitar and Doug Ardito on bass. Scantlin played them a song he'd been working on called "Hate Sex," and asked for help completing it. That's when Stewart started playing the riff, which changed the song.
  
  "It happened pretty quick," Scantlin told Songfacts. "'Control' used to be called 'Hate Sex,' and then Brad gave it a different rhythm and he just started playing it on bass."
• Fred Durst directed the music video, which starts with Scantlin's girlfriend kicking him out of her truck, leaving him to walk to his next gig. Music video tradition would have that gig packed with adoring fans in awe of the mesmerizing stage show, but Durst took a different approach, showing Puddle Of Mudd playing in a bar to about 20 people, most of them hanging out at the bar or playing pool. This was much closer to Scantlin's reality: he played to many sparse crowds throughout the '90s as he was trying to climb the ladder.
  
  Durst wrote the treatment but Scantlin says he really was kicked out of a girlfriend's car and had to walk to a gig.
• In a case of life imitating art, Scantlin was arrested in March 2002 after fighting with his fiancée, Michelle Rubin on the side of a highway, echoing a scene in the video for "Control" that shows him arguing with a girl by the side of a road and never quite making up. Charges were not filed.