Songfacts®:

• On this slow Southern blues number, Dead Weather frontwoman Alison Mosshart is toying with a lover. Bass player Jack Lawrence described the writing process of Sea of Cowards to the Associated Press: "All of us are writing in one room together. We're going in with nothing usually and sitting down and someone comes up with one part, and everybody else chimes in. And Alison's sitting over in the corner writing lyrics to it the whole time."
• The song is part of the second Dead Weather album, Sea Of Cowards. Their first, Horehound, was released the previous year in 2009.
  
  Alison Mosshart set her duo The Kills aside during this time, and Jack White did the same with his, The White Stripes (White is the drummer in The Dead Weather). White used the band to christen his new studios, Third Man, in Nashville, where they recorded. After the two albums and subsequent tours, The Dead Weather were inactive for a few years. They recorded some singles in 2013 and released another album in 2015 but never went back on tour.