Songfacts®:

• Frontman Jim James told Mojo magazine May 2008: "This song is very theatrical. We sung in cartoon voices. They're supposed to sound like angry police officers, highly suspicious of you, knocking down your door. The main character, the one I'm singing, is this paranoid drug addict that the police are coming to get."
• The goofy tune is just one of many creative experiments on the album, which takes the listener on a trip through different genres, kind of like Mario on his surreal journey to save Princess Toadstool. "For me, Evil Urges was like a video game," James told The Guardian in 2011. "If you play Super Mario Brothers, there's a level where it's like a snowscape, and then there's a level where it's a desert, and a level that's like a jungle. I wanted to make all these different levels for the album, so you were like: 'Oh f--k, what's going on here?' You walk in the next room and it's kind of mellow, and then you walk into the next room and you're like, what the f--k's going on?"
• MMJ's fanbase was split in general over the indie-rock band's eccentric album, but this tune, in particular, contributed to the divide. "It confused some people," James admitted. "'Highly Suspicious' wasn't ironic, I wasn't making fun of it, but I thought it was fun and hilarious. I guess people have a hard time dealing with humor in music. But sometimes life is depressing, and sometimes life is fun, is about just laughing with your friends, and I wanted to express that, as well as the darker stuff."
• With Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket wanted to move away from the meandering, jam-band vibe of their earlier albums and tighten up their rhythm. While it might sound like the band gave their drummer, Patrick Hallahan, a break in favor of a drum machine, the percussion was man-made at Avatar Studios in New York City. Hallahan told EQ Magazine in 2008:
  
  "Going into Avatar, I knew which songs I wanted to sound dry and tight, and which songs I wanted to sound open and roomy, so we immediately set up two rooms for two different sounds. The rather large main room was the right environment for big-sounding songs like 'Evil Urges,' and Smokin' From Shootin.' A dead vocal booth worked perfectly for the more machine-like beats on 'Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Parts 1 and 2' and 'Highly Suspicious.'"
• While the album was recorded in New York City, it was written in the Colorado mountains, where the band hunkered down in a remote cabin for a month. At this point, the guys all lived in different parts of the country, which made it hard to get together outside of touring. In a 2008 interview with the Associated Press, guitarist Carl Broemel recalled how the Colorado sessions helped them reconnect with their purpose as a band:
  
  "I think it was special because we go on tour together and that's just a constant moving thing, whereas in Colorado we stayed in one place and just marinated in that place, literally. We cooked a lot, we played a lot of basketball ... and we made music together. More importantly, because we were so secluded, I think the isolation forced us to realize why we're still in this band together, why we're on this quest."
• This was used on the teen drama One Tree Hill in the 2008 episode "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream: Part 1," which was named after another track from the album.