Songfacts®:

• A track from Screaming Trees' first album, "Strange Out Here" finds lead singer Mark Lanegan singing about "this city built on broken glass, and the carcasses of a million dead sheep."
  
  This city is Ellensburg, Washington, where the group is from and where they recorded the album. The studio was on Third Street, thus the lines:
  
  Where the blood runs thick down third street
  Down the gutter to the railroad station
• The group's guitarist, Gary Lee Conner, considers this one of Mark Lanegan's best vocal performances. "It was kind mellow," he said in Greg Prato's book Lanegan. He wrote all those lyrics, so it was real heartfelt – as opposed to me singing about purple unicorns or something.
  
  In addition to his work with Screaming Trees, Lanegan released a series of solo albums and also contributed to some Queens Of The Stone Age songs, including "In The Fade" and "Hanging Tree." He died in 2022 at 57.
• The spoken part in the middle is a parody/homage to The Doors, whose lead singer, Jim Morrison, would sometimes insert breaks in their songs so he could recite his poetry - "The WASP (Texas Radio and The Big Beat)" is a good example.
• Screaming Trees were one of the first bands to emerge from the Pacific Northwest scene that became the epicenter of grunge. Their '80s output was on the indie label SST, but in 1990 they got a major-label with Epic. Their second Epic album, Sweet Oblivion (1992) is their most successful, thanks to the song "Nearly Lost You," which was used in the movie Singles. The band had their squabbles but stayed together until 2000, when they abruptly split after performing at the opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle.