Songfacts®:

• "Crackle And Drag" is about the suicide of poetess Sylvia Plath. The title is taken from the final line of her poem "Edge": "Her blacks crackle and drag."
  
  The "blacks" are stage curtains being drawn close.
  
  "Edge" is about a recently deceased woman, possibly Plath's future self. It might be the last poem she ever wrote. Uncertainties in her personal records make it unclear if the last was "Edge" or "Balloons," but historians lean towards "Edge."
• And as her babies slept, she took a long deep breath
  Now they're zipping her up in a bag
  
  Plath committed suicide by sealing herself in her kitchen and running a gas oven as her children slept. Her nurse found her on February 11, 1963. She's still widely read and taught in university English classes.
• In a 2003 interview with the Minneapolis/Saint Paul City Pages (Volume 24, Issue 1193), Westerberg explained that he read Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, and some of her collected journals and diaries. He was struck by the calculated way she killed herself.
  
  "Just the way she made the pillows so neat in the oven door," he said. In typical, grim Westerberg fashion, he added, "I always go back and forth: Would I have done that and saved the children, to see their dead mother? Or would I have killed the kids with me?"
• Westerberg included two versions of the song on Come Feel Me Tremble, his fifth solo studio album. The songs appear back-to-back, with the first being a faster rock version that harkens back to his days in The Replacements, and the second being slowed-down and acoustic. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  John - Levittown, NY
• On July 1, 2002, before releasing Come Feel Me Tremble, Westerberg played "Crackle And Drag" at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. He joked that he didn't include the song on his fourth studio album, Stereo, because it had "too many words." He fumbled through the beginning but then found his groove and delivered an emotional, evocative rendition.