Medicine Wheel

Album: @#%&! Smilers (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • With the baleful tone and high-quality production values that are characteristic of Smilers, Mann plants the seeds for yet another accusatory breakup ballad that is devastating yet charming. Named after the American Indian tradition of constructing a medicine wheel, a symbolic grouping of stones that grow outward from a central spoke, the song is from the perspective of a woman whose man is putting her in harm's way and criminal activities, and so they attempt to break up. "The day you left and you called me bitch, I called you selfish. Better pull that switch, put my son on amphetamines." Perhaps his dark nature was seductive at first, but by the end, she calls him out for his thievery: "Everything that's good, you steal from me."

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