This song was begun in January of 1994. I had moved to Seattle with my friends and bandmates the previous Summer, all of us eager to make real our "rock star" dreams. Of course, none of us really knew how to do that, exactly - so what we did was rehearse a lot in the basement of the house in Bellevue we rented, watch a lot of TV, and occasionally make up a song or two.

I recall starting this song after a particularly nasty blow-up that left me thinking that our little band experiment was kaput. It wasn't, not quite yet, and once I had finished the music for this, the guys in the band liked it well enough to work on it.

We were all big fans of the show "Lois and Clark" which was then in its first season. Or, I should say we were all fans of Teri Hatcher, as Lois Lane. That's her voice you hear at various points in the song, recorded off the TV in a "next week on"-style promo.

I wasn't really writing lyrics yet back then, since that was the lead singer's job, but I felt strongly that I knew what this song should be about. When I showed it to Tobe originally, I had the title and the opening line, "Morning, time to rise and shine." I told him the concept, and he finished out the first verse. I think he actually wrote a version of words for the whole tune, but I only heard a little of what he did since we never played the song live or in rehearsal, and only a snippet of a demo with his vocals on it survives. I loved what he did with that first verse and kept it all.

Not too long after that we did have a final blow-up and our band, Stop Hitting Me, was no more. This was one of the first songs I finished in the aftermath.

For "Any Raw Flesh?" this song was one of three recorded twice for the project. The first sessions for the album happened in February 1998 at a studio in Tacoma owned by Keith Woodman. These sessions were a pseudo-Stop Hitting Me reunion with me on guitar, Tobe Ramsey on bass, and Chris G on drums, and we recorded versions of this song, "Firefly" and "Strange Ways."

Woodman had a bunch of personal issues arise in mid-1998, and I had all kinds of financial problems, and so nothing more was done on this album for almost a year, when in February 1999 I walked into Darin Di Pietro's studio for the first time. After working with Darin for a few months, it was obvious that the recordings we had done the year before had to be scrapped, and we re-recorded all three tracks in mid-2000. Unfortunately, Tobe Ramsey wasn't available to re-do his bass parts, so Bryan Beller came up for his second session of the project to do the bass.

This song remains one of the most popular that I have ever done, and is possibly still my favorite song of mine to play live. I like playing it because it "works" - there's an instant reaction to it, even among crowds that have never heard it before.