In 1998 or so, I was at the salvation army where I found a shirt that said "Let's Hear It For Fire Safety!". I bougt it, of course, took it home, and it became one of my favorite shirts. The shirt also had a dog on it dressed like a fire man, and on his fire hat it said Sparky. It also said to check your smoke detectors.
Maybe a year or so later, I was watching late night TV, real late, when advertising is dirt cheap so you get lots of public service anouncements and there was sparky the dog giving fire safety tips and saying "let's hear it for fire safety!!" I got very, very excited and pointed to the tv and said "thats my shirt" with a smile bigger than any fire you've ever seen.
I couldn't stop thinking about it and I kept thinking to me self "Let's hear it for fire safety!". I liked it so much, I decided to write a song about it. I ended up writing that song sometime in novemebr of 1999, most likely. Maybe a little earlier, i'm not exactly sure. I'm not sure exactly when I recorded it either. But november of 99 is probably right for both of them. I got really paranoid when I wrote the song because I wanted to write a song that wasn't too sexual, but the song was getting boring and needed a kick, so i said "screw it, let's sex this song up." I think that paranoia worked out well as I with held the sexual part for most of the first verse, and then it hits you by complete sirprise. The three lines at the very end, about how i cant fuck you if you burn away, were came up with durring the recording session and not while i was writing the song.
The music its self was moddled after the song "Low" by Cracker. When I was first recording this song, my electric bass was broken, so I used my accoustic bass. Now, I like my accousting bass allot, and on all the other tracks that use my accoustic bass, I like it. But i didn't like the accoustic bass on this track and wanted to switch it to to electric, and I didn't do that till about a week and half before Titty Titty Yum Yum's release in October of 2000. Also fixed at the time was the reverb. I thought that I didn't have enough reverb on the chorus, so i increased it a million times and played with it on the drum track a bit.
By the way, to better pin point that date.... when I first recorded and mixed down, I didn't have any reverb yet. The guitar part was looped through a 3 head tape deck for its echo, but I didn't have a real echo or reverb spacific machine yet. However, I was displeased with my first mix down of that song, so I went to re mix it a short while later. With in that short time, I had got my reverb, and decided to try it out on this track. This is the first track i ever used reverb on, and I liked it. Any hoo, that would mean this track was probably initialy recorded sometime in mid october.