Songfacts®:

• As he often did with the lyrics he wrote for Stone Temple Pilots, Scott Weiland bared his soul on this track, where offered a glimpse into psyche. Weiland, who died of a drug overdose in 2015, suffered from bipolar disorder, which plays out in the lyric, which is full of contrasts, starting with the opening lines:
  
  My friend blue he runs the show
  With hot pink purple china glow
  
  By this time, he was a bona fide rock star and dealing with the machinations that came with it. This plays out in lines like:
  
  Corporate records' fiscal year
  Down the river, down the river
  
  A rather poignant line is, "Sell more records if I'm dead."
• Stone Temple Pilots bass player Robert DeLeo wrote the music for this one, which Weiland added words to. In a Songfacts interview with DeLeo, he said: "That's a special one. When I wrote these pieces of music, I didn't know where Scott was going to go lyrically, so it was a surprise sometimes to hear where he went and what he chose for that. Sometimes, you write a piece of music and you have a melody, and then you hear the words and you go, 'Ah, I wasn't really thinking that. But it's great.' With that song, what he wrote about and how he approached it was beautiful.
• You don't expect to hear a trumpet on a Stone Temple Pilots song, but "Adhesive" features a trumpet break by Dave Ferguson. Robert DeLeo told Songfacts: "I always try to incorporate different instruments into our music. I wanted to hear a Herb Alpert kind of trumpet solo, and I think it was the right song for it. I love what the gentleman who played on it did on that. It was so fitting."
  
  The song also features a Fender Rhodes electric piano played by their drummer, Eric Kretz.