Songfacts®:

• According to Flaming Lips biographer Jim DeRogatis, author of Staring At Sound: The True Story of Oklahoma's Fabulous Flaming Lips, this paranoia-fueled rock tune is actually a love song that finds the narrator desperately trying to express his emotions via unconsciously screaming.
• This was a labor of love for the band, who mixed the song over 200 times before they were satisfied. Frontman Wayne Coyne recalled in the notes for the compilation The Day They Shot A Hole In The Jesus Egg: "To this day I believe 'Unconsciously Screamin'' is the most reworked - remixed - re-f--ked with song we've ever done - hard to believe listening to it. It seems quite simple by our standards of today - but this was 1989 - and even though computer technologies were beginning to be used, we had none of it, and even if it would have been available I'm sure we would have laughed at it... I believe we arrived at a mix that we didn't despise somewhere around the two-hundredth pass... The whole summer would be spent applying, this kind of uncertainty and enthusiasm, to the demo tapes we had done back home."
• This was also released on an EP of the same name in 1991.
• In A Priest Driven Ambulance is the first Flaming Lips album to feature Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev on guitar and Nathan Roberts on drums.
• In a 2008 interview with Uncut, Wayne gave the story behind the album title: "I definitely use the ambulance driver as a metaphor, it stands for the kind of the panic that seems to always motivate us at the eleventh hour. I've said that the Flaming Lips never arrive by limousine, we always arrive by ambulance. It's like, there we are at the last f--king possible minute. I like that idea of, 'Get out of the f--king way, here we are!' This idea being, if we don't get there right now, it's going to die. That's how a lot of Flaming Lips ideas come into being, because they have a force of panic that gets us through the wall of whatever it is that art has to get through, whether it's good, great, s--tty or whatever... It has to get into the world. And this idea of the ambulance, I've always liked that. A lot of what we sing about, even when I go back to our very first records, is death. This thing that happens to you when you're confronted with the idea that you're going to die and the people around you are going to die, and how it helps you live for right now."
• The music video, directed by Jim Spring and Jens Jurgensen, was shot at the Holy Land USA religious theme park in Waterbury, Connecticut.