De-loused in the Comatorium was The Mars Volta's first concept album. The songs tell the fictional story of Cerpin Taxt, who falls into a coma after a morphine overdose and finds himself in a strange world within his own mind.

In this song, Cerpin awakens from a dream-within-a-dream to find himself stapled to the deck of a seemingly abandoned barge afloat in the middle of the open ocean. The barge smashes constantly against shipwrecks and tears him loose from the deck, as segments of 747s and Cessnas rain down from above. >>

Lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and sound manipulation artist Jeremy Michael Ward created the short story upon which the album is based. Ward died one month before the album's release from an apparent heroin overdose. After his death, Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez quit using narcotics.

The album was recorded at Harry Houdini's house, which is said to be haunted.

Bixler-Zavala described his songwriting process in a 2004 interview with rockcircustv.com: "I always ad-lib. I don't ever sing anything concrete until it gets closer to the deadline and we have to do the stuff. Omar has everything written pretty much and then we take it to Theodore, John Theodore our drummer, and he dissects it even more. And then it becomes its own little walking monster. But yeah, it's always music first, and then the story got put together bit by bit, even when the record was finished. It's easier to put all the gaps in, put the cement between the bricks, so music first."