Songfacts®:

• In the film Dark Secrets: The Stories of Rubberneck, Toadies frontman Vaden Todd Lewis told the story behind this song. "I was dating a girl and I had this dream that she had invited me to a party, so I'm going to go to this party. I'm walking down the street and as I get closer to the party there's a mailbox on fire, then there's a trash can on fire and then eventually there's just whole houses engulfed in flames. So, I'm getting closer to the party and I get to this house and I kind of walk around the back where the party is and it's all these people jumping around and dancing around. There's music, there's drums and there's a giant bonfire and one by one these people are throwing themselves into the fire.
  
  The idea is that they were going to transcend their physical bodies by immolation, so they were going to burn themselves in order to become some higher power, something bigger outside the physical realm. And that's what 'I Burn' is about. That's taking the voice of somebody who was in that cult or whatever you want to call it."
• The character in this song is the same one who haunts "Possum Kingdom," the Toadies most popular song. "As I'm wont to do a lot of times, I make up a character and carry that through several songs," Lewis explained. "I finished out 'I Burn' and I thought, 'Suppose this guy does it and he's just screwed because now he's just smoke and where does he go from there?' So, he goes to Possum Kingdom and tries to find somebody to join him."