Songfacts®:

• On The Hazards of Love, the Decemberists are joined by guest vocalists including Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark, who sings on this song and Morning Jacket's Jim James. Decemberists' frontman Colin Meloy explained to Rolling Stone: "I wanted to have different voices singing different songs, so it would be like a fake musical."
• The A.V.Club asked Meloy if he wrote the songs for the females who guested on the album in their voice ranges. He replied: "Well, I didn't know their ranges well enough, and having never written for women before, it was all really guesswork, just assuming they were gonna have a far superior range than mine. So the two songs Becky sings, I actually wrote in my own range, because I was still writing for myself." Meloy added: "Working with the girls was kind of a huge question mark from the beginning. I don't think we had a real strong idea about how it was gonna sound, or even if—I think Becky, when we sent over the song, said 'Oh yeah, I can do that.' And we thought 'Okay,' just assuming she could, but there were some notes that were super-high, and at some point before she flew out, just to make sure, we had to take out a Lavender Diamond record and look for the highest note we could find her singing, just to make sure she would be able to do it. And we discovered that she could, no problem. That was definitely a challenge."