Songfacts®:

• Vocalist Ben Bridwell told The Skinny the story of this bar room rocker: "I had the music down for this as a demo but I couldn't figure out what to sing on it basically and I think I just went to mine the territory of living in Seattle and some of the situations that revolved around that time. To me it's comedic but I don't know if anyone will ever get what the f--k I'm talking about 'cos it's done in my usual way of masking the actual content of what's really going on."
• One of the inspirations for this song was an eerie experience Bridwell had years previously, on his first day of a writing stay at the resort town of Moclips in Washington, USA. He told UK newspaper The Independent how the window of the mobile home next door haunted him. "I thought 'ah, somebody's in there'," he recalled. "And they never left. I never saw it move again. I never saw anybody, there was nobody on the beach walking around. Of course the imagination starts working. So I'm sitting there trying to record something, and I keep hearing this 'ding, ding, ding' and... what is that noise? Now I'm convinced that someone is trapped in an underground basement. Because they haven't heard a car go by on this dirt road for so long, they're trying desperately to get my attention. The sun's going down, I'm going to explore this weird-ass mile of dirt road. And when I come back, it's this flagpole, right outside my place, going 'ding, ding' in the wind. It's those little things, those tinges of paranoia where your mind starts telling yourself... terrible things! There's no one around that you can have comfort in. It's up to me to save this Silence of the Lambs situation."
  
  Years later, Bridwell recalled the experience in this song's line, "somebody trapped in an underground basement just down the road."