Several songs on "Moon Pix"— "No Sense," "Say," "Metal Heart," "You May Know Him" and "Cross Bones Style"— were written "in one deranged night," following a hallucinatory nightmare Marshall had in the fall of 1997, while alone in the South Carolina farmhouse she shared with her then-boyfriend, Bill Callahan. "I got woken up by someone in the field behind my house in South Carolina," she explained. "The earth started shaking, and dark spirits were smashing up against every window of my house. I woke up and I had my kitten next to me...and I started praying to God to help me...So I just ran and got my guitar because I was trying to distract myself. I had to turn on the lights and sing to God. I got a tape recorder and recorded the next sixty minutes. And I played these long changes, into six different songs. That's where I got the record."