Singled Out: Puddle of Mudd's Stoned

"Stoned" is the only song that we co-wrote with someone outside of the band. We wrote this with producer Brian Howes in Vancouver. Upon arriving to his studio on the first day, he showed us a real basic structure and melody that me, him, and Wes molded into the finished song. We sat on a couch and finished all the music out first and then we sat around with a pad and paper and wrote the lyrics. The inspiration was basically a rant against working for the man. Sometimes in any business or job, including the music biz, you are forced to do things that you don't agree with.

There are some specific things we have had to deal with that we began to discuss and the lyrics just fell into place. As for the actual recording, we took a day on drums, a day on bass, and a couple of days on guitars, while doing vocals at night. The scream that you hear at the top of the track is actually the scratch track. Wes laid down a rough vocal for us to play to and we ended up keeping that scream. He tried to recreate when we were really doing vocals, but he just couldn't beat it, so the hand held mic in the control room version is what you hear.

The end of the song also has some "magic." Wes and I had a habit of hitting the bars every night after recording and the night before our last day was no exception. Wes just had a few more overdub vocals to do, so we went all out the night before. Well, needless to say we were quite hung over the next day and Wes was dying in the vocal booth. He had the runner go and get him some chicken wings, thinking that would fix him up. Well, a few takes later, he disappeared in the vocal booth and quit singing. We stopped the playback and realized he was having quite an alcohol and chicken wing puke extravaganza. Luckily, the tape was still rolling and we captured every moment of it. We knew we had to use it, so in the final mix, we flew it over to the end of the song and that is where it will live forever.