Songfacts®:

• "Mein" is German for "my" or "mine." Beyond that, it's difficult to say anything definitive about the song's meaning. Deftones lyricist Chino Moreno hasn't said much about this one.
  
  The song clearly deals with his relationship with someone or something. He talks about some sort of barrier between them and his refusal to enter a forbidden space (he's looked inside the space but won't step inside), so that he will always stay away from the person - this suggests a temptation that he finds hard to resist but knows that he must. He's doing all he can to stay away from someone that he knows isn't healthy for him. While this conflict rages around Moreno, the universe is "breaking" the pair down. All in all it's a mysterious song, but it's hard not to think of Moreno's first wife, Celeste, as their marriage was being dissolved at the time of recording. Then again, it could be about Deftones themselves, as the relationships between all the old friends were more strained than ever before.
• "Mein" was one of the last songs recorded for Saturday Night Wrist, Deftones' fifth studio album. The recording process was contentious from the start, with band members at each other's throats much of the time. They were under a lot of pressure because they'd invested an enormous amount of money into their previous studio album (the self-titled Deftones) but failed to capture the sales numbers that their record label (Maverick) had come to expect from them. Moreno had a particularly difficult time as his marriage fell apart and he dealt with drug issues.
  
  The stress stifled Moreno's writing to the point where he considered quitting the band entirely. Getting desperate, he elected to try something out of the White Pony playbook, where he'd contacted Maynard James Keenan of Tool to contribute to "Passenger." He sent the unfinished "Mein" track to Serj Tankian of System of a Down to see if Tankian could give him some ideas. Tankian misunderstood Moreno's intent and thought Deftones wanted him fully involved on the project, so he wrote some lyrics and recorded some vocals. "The next day, he sent it back to me with vocals all over it," Moreno told Kerrang!. "It was great! It gave me a completely different perspective but it did sound a lot like System of a Down. I focused on one part of it which gave it a foundation that everyone really liked." Tankian's vocals appear on the final, official version. He wasn't included in the music video and has never performed the song live with (or without) Deftones.
• Shaun Lopez of the bands Far and Revolution Smile is credited as co-writer. He helped with some of the production on Saturday Night Wrist, though Bob Ezrin (previous work includes Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd) led the effort.
• This is the last single that Deftones recorded with Chi Cheng on bass. On November 4, 2008, he was driving home from a memorial service for his brother when he collided with another car at 60 mph. The impact sent his car, with him and his sister Mae in it, flipping three times through the air. Cheng wasn't wearing his seatbelt and launched from the vehicle (Mae suffered only minor injuries). Cheng survived but went into a coma and didn't leave the hospital until 2012. He died in 2013 from a heart attack.
• "Mein" was one of two singles released off Saturday Night Wrist. The other was "Hole In The Earth."