The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste for the album. Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly instead attributed the album's sound to the band's interest in technology. For pre-production, Rieflin said he and Barker watched films for a month, sampling anything that caught their interest. Instead of writing music, they all improvised individually, rarely collaborating with each other. Connelly compared it to exquisite corpse, a Surrealist technique in which an artistic work is created collaboratively without any of the participants having knowledge of the others' contribution. Rieflin cited "So What" as the only track to feature two musicians in the studio at the same time. After playing with
When This Cruel War Is Over Confederate songwriter John Hill Hewitt to write an answer song, titled "When Upon the Field of Glory". A lyric sung to the same melody, called "When This Cruel Draft Is Over", lamented the plight of potential draftees, and later in the war, lyrics to this tune praising George McClellan, and championing him as a presidential candidate to succeed Abraham Lincoln, were written under the title "Shouting 'Mac' and Freedom". The tune also inspired one Sergeant Johnson of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry to write lyrics to the tune as a prisoner of war, entitled "Down in Charleston Jail". Other answer songs