On March 11, 1998, Tom Dunning phoned to tell me that there were five extra minutes of space on his CD. I knew I could fill those five minutes, but with what? Every band I was in was either already on the CD or indisposed. Tom mentioned Mouse, who fell into the latter category. He'd seen us the previous summer in one of an ongoing series of occasional farewell concerts. We were saying farewell that time because Jackson Wilson, our guitarist, was moving to San Francisco. Despite this obvious hindrance, Mouse, after a few phone calls, developed the perhaps unreasonable conviction that those five minutes had our name on them.

With what song would we fill those precious minutes?

After Tom set the condition that the song must come from one of the three under-represented albums -- LIONHEART, NEVER FOR EVER, or THE RED SHOES -- and I took into account the fact that Mouse only records songs dealing with certain subject matters (i.e. undeserved death, ill-advised military expeditions, greed and piety, mayhem), it was obvious that we had only one choice: "Coffee Homeground." (OK, two choices, but we didn't want to do "Army Dreamers.")

Jackson flew in on Saturday night, March 28, 1998. We spent five hours together on Sunday, playing through the song maybe forty times until it sounded like a Mouse song. We decided to mostly de-oompah the song and imagined it as a drug addict's paranoid delusions, a woman lying on the ground in squalor thinking she's been poisoned by a man who covets her t.v. or the $3 in her filthy jeans. We recorded and mixed the song on Monday and Tuesday with the generous help and expertise of Bob Weston.

If anything is not clear, please re-read this.

-Eddie Carlson, with Jackson and Jenny, Mouse

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