Songfacts®:

• If there's one thing you can count on in life, aside from death, taxes, and the complete mystery of how fitted sheets work, it's that Mike Scott of The Waterboys will never do anything in half measures. Which brings us to Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, a song cycle that explores the rise and ruin of the late American actor Dennis Hopper.
• The album started with Scott finding himself immersed in the wild and tangled life of Hopper - the Kansas-born Hollywood rebel who ricocheted between genius, madness, and five marriages. Scott channeled his thoughts into a song simply titled "Dennis Hopper," which popped up on The Waterboys' 2020 album Good Luck, Seeker. That could've been it. A one-off tribute. A lyrical nod. A hat tip from one maverick to another.
  
  Just as Scott was toying with the idea of a small digital-only Hopper-themed EP, three of his bandmates casually dropped a collection of seven instrumental tracks into his inbox, an act of musical ambush that would change the course of the project. "The instrumentals arrived just as I was thinking about Dennis and, bang, all these songs started coming and I knew it would be an album," Scott told The Sun.
  
  The resulting album - co-produced with bandmates James Hallawell and Brother Paul Brown - contains a sprawling 25 tracks and maps the whole arc of Hopper's life, from wide-eyed Kansas youth to countercultural icon, five-time husband, chaotic tumble, and eventual redemption. In other words, it's the full Hopper.
• The haunting "Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend" veers away from biopic and squarely into gut punch. Written by Scott but performed entirely by Fiona Apple, it's sung from the imagined perspective of one of Hopper's former lovers, a composite character steeped in real-life reports of his tumultuous relationships and abusive behavior. Apple delivers a raw and emotionally charged vocal and piano performance and the stark arrangement heightens the sense of isolation, anger, and cracked beauty.
• Mike Scott specifically wrote the song for a woman to sing, seeking a voice that could convey both righteousness and anger; Fiona Apple was chosen for her emotive delivery, having previously covered The Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon" for The Affair in 2019.
  
  "Fiona Apple covered 'The Whole of the Moon' for a TV series six years ago, so I thought she might be up for it," Scott told Uncut magazine. "We were gonna send her an instrumental, and she was gonna do a vocal. But her demo changed the game. She did it on a piano, and I thought, 'This has all the intensity and the power and delivery that we need."
• As for that "Whole of the Moon" cover, Scott places it in his personal Top 3 alongside Prince's version and what he describes as "a great gay disco version."