Songfacts®:

• Rickie Lee Jones' sophomore album Pirates documents the dissolution of her relationship with longtime lover Tom Waits. Its creation was backdropped by the singer's spiral into cocaine and heroin addiction and colored by her troubled family history. She told the July 2011 edition of Mojo magazine about this eight-minute epic, which she co-wrote with then-boyfriend Sal Bernardi: "It's a picture from the top of this mountain, where it's eternally twilight, death is there. I really thought there were angels near me. I was hearing things, seeing things. It was a very bad, sad time."
• Explaining the influences on this song, Jones told Uncut: "'Traces of the Western Slopes' was like West Side Story, I was drawing you into a scene. That was my reference, not songwriting – the scene when Riff and Tony are killed under the freeway was the fear of my own life at the time. The other influence was Rimbaud, who I was reading constantly. Steely Dan was a big influence in general: those chords in the chorus are certainly inspired by their dark patterns."