Songfacts®:

• Nina Nastasia is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist known for her emotive and evocative songwriting and her distinctive, expressive voice. She incorporates elements of folk, rock, and experimental music into her work.
  
  Nastasia recorded "Stormy Weather" for her debut album, Dogs. She wrote most of the tracks between 1992 to 1998 while she was working as a waitress in New York. Nastasia hated the job and used her free time to write songs.
• Before moving to New York, Nastasia lived in Seattle, where she taught herself to play guitar. This is the Dogs track she is most proud of. "'Stormy Weather' doesn't pay any attention to any rules that, if I were to start learning the guitar, I'd maybe have to think about," she explained to Uncut magazine. "So I was maybe going a bit more sophisticated than I was aware of, musically."
• She comes running in
  "We're all on fire"
  She says so hysterically
  I'm in the shower
  She says, "save the water"
  
  Nastasia's mother died when she was 18, and here she recalls certain things she grew up with. "She would go through cortisone psychosis due to the steroid medications she took for her lung condition," the singer explained to Uncut. "Some of those episodes were quite scary - there was a moment when she pulled me out of the shower. And said, 'Oh, my gosh, the house is on fire,' oh she'd be talking on the phone and nobody was there."
• Nina Nastasia played the guitar on the track. The other musicians are:
  
  Gonzalo Muñoz: musical saw
  Stephen A.F. Day: cello
  Dave Richards: bass
  Julianne Klopotic: violin
  
  Violinist Julianne Klopotic also did the string arrangement. Other albums she's played on include Rufus Wainwright's Want Two and Coheed And Cambria's The Afterman: Ascension and The Afterman: Descension. Klopotic also contributed to Sheryl Crow's 1997 Bond theme "Tomorrow Never Dies."
• Nastasia recorded Dogs with Nirvana producer Steve Albini at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago. "Walking into such a beautiful studio, and working with Steve, that was such a super-lucky, great, great way to do the first record," she said. "He can make it sound like you're in the room."
• Nastasia initially released Dogs on the small independent label Socialist Records in 2000. The CD release of the album quickly went out of print, but it gained popularity in the UK after BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel championed the record. With new demand for the album, Touch and Go Records reissued Dogs in 2004.