Songfacts®:

• Here, Kacey Musgraves joins The Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne to sing about a fugitive on the run. They don't know specify what or who this person is running from, but both "God and the Policeman" know what they've done.
• Though Coyne doesn't detail the fugitive's backstory, he told Apple Music it ties into a drug story involving a friend of the band. He got caught up in a bad drug deal and a biker drug dealer warned him, "If you don't pay me, I'm going to kill you."
  
  So their friend went to the dealer's house and killed the biker. He said, "See you later. I'll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer."
• After Kacey Musgraves performed The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize??" at Bonnaroo 2019, Coyne called her up to see if she wanted to sing on American Head. They texted ideas back-and-forth for a few months.
  
  "One morning," he recalled to Uncut magazine, "I sent her a photo of a donut that I'd gotten from Tim Horton's. 'Here's what I'm doing. I'm eating this donut. What are you up to?' And she sent me back this photo of what I thought was a Chicken McNugget, but it was actually her gallbladder. She was in the hospital having it removed. She sent me a photo of it there in the dish in the operating room. That's really what sealed it for me. That's how I knew she was our kind of people."
• When Coyne and his bandmate Steven Drozd played Musgraves "God And The Policeman," she told them it was the American Head track she wanted to be on. "I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton," Coyne told Apple Music. "I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run."
• After recording her vocals for "God And The Policeman," Musgraves contributed to two other American Head tracks: "Watching The Lightbugs Glow" and "Flowers Of Neptune 6."
• Wayne Coyne co-directed the video alongside Blake Studdard. It finds The Flaming Lips frontman fleeing from the police before being apprehended and taken away in handcuffs.