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
What the Rose did to the Cypress court. He gave the king a diamond and said it was his last treasure. The king wished to please him, but the prince wanted only the answer to the riddle. When he asked, the king said he would have killed anyone else, but when the king went on asking what the prince wanted, the prince refused to ask for anything. Finally, the king told him that he could have what he wanted, if he consented to die afterward. He was the cypress, and his wife, whom he had brought before them in chains and rags, was the rose. He had