Songfacts®:

• Paddy McAloon sings here about meeting songwriting legend Jimmy Webb. He told Mojo November 2013: "I met him on a TV show in the early '90s in Dublin. I wouldn't have the nerve to do it now...it's a vague chronology of that day, more of a fan letter, if my 11-year-old self had been able to write one to Jimmy Webb."
  
  McAloon added: "'Wichita Lineman' is embedded in a strange school memory of having to go on a cross country run and passing this pub, hearing it on the radio and it doing something, like a chemical shift. That was the beginning, yeah."
• According to an interview with Paddy McAloon on BBC Radio 6 Music, the Crimson/Red album title is a reference to Mark Rothgo. The Abstract Expressionist painter is considered to be one of the most famous postwar American artists along with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.