Songfacts®:

• This song is about the moments just before sex, and how you lose some innocence in that brief time. The title reflects a typical time on a clock during a sexual encounter because many people check the time just as lovemaking begins. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Bertrand - Paris, France
• Nick Valensi managed to painstakingly create the sound of a synthesized keyboard with his guitar for this song. However when a friend heard it, he responded with crushing logic, "Why didn't he just play a keyboard?"
• Valensi reportedly blew out multiple amplifiers while trying to achieve the keyboard-like guitar tone on this song.
• Valensi told Guitar Player in 2003 how he constructed the unique guitar sound: "I was playing these silly little jazz things using my neck pickup with the guitar's tone control rolled all the way down, and I accidentally stepped on the DeVille's channel-switching footpedal. The gain on that channel was on 12, and all of a sudden the tone sounded like an analog-synth sound - or a weird heavy-metal, Joe Satriani tone. Julian was the one who really saw the possibilities of that tone for '12:51.' So I played along with the vocal melody, doubled the part, and that was it. It was all a bit of an accident - I was just trying to get a nice jazz tone - but it sounded cool. The DeVilles didn't really like that tone, though. I blew up three of them."
• This was influenced by Sonic Youth's 1994 hit "Bull In The Heather" - so much so that it made Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas nervous. He told Spin in 2003: "When we were recording it, I said to Gordon [Raphael, producer], 'Do you think it sounds too much like that Sonic Youth song? Because I'm totally ripping it off.'"