Songfacts®:

• Ronnie James Dio had a major hand in the writing of all the Dio material once the band was launched in 1982, but one tune on their seventh studio album, Angry Machines, proved to be an anomaly in the songwriting department. It's credited to Dio and the other three members of his band - guitarist Tracy Grijalva, bass player Jeff Pilson, and drummer Vinny Appice - but was primarily written by Pilson, who is best known as a member of Dokken but was in Dio at the time.
  
  Pilson wrote an early version of the song when he was in a short-lived band called Freakshow with Craig Goldy and Scott Warren, but they never released it. According to Goldy, Ronnie James Dio loved the song and kept about 95% of the original version intact. "That really is a big deal for him to think so highly of a song that he would go ahead and use the melody line and the lyrics of someone else," Goldy said in the 2015 book Survival Of The Fittest: Heavy Metal In The 1990s.
• "Stay Out Of My Mind" is one of the more unusual and polarizing Dio tracks. It runs 7:11, with an orchestral passage about three minutes in that gives way to an industrial groove. The musically jarring track suits the lyrics, which deal confusion, hinting at psychosis.
  
  Ronnie James Dio and Scott Warren, who played keyboard on the track, came up with this section.