That song is pretty important to the album. It was in the first batch that Blockhead sent me and I don’t know if anyone else he was collaborating with passed up that beat, but to me when I heard that beat I was like ‘Oh my God!’… I think it’s one of the best songs in my catalog personally… I was coming back from DC on the Chinatown bus and this really beautiful girl ends up sitting next to me and then we end up having this really involved conversation on the way up. She was half Dominican and her dad had somehow been involved with the Trujillo regime and she was like an illegitimate child or something, but she had grown up here…She was beautiful, political, and she was a writer and I’m sitting there like “Yo, I would wife this girl if I was still young.”…But she was talking about how Rafael Trujillo had this thing where he would come through and basically demand to have sex with the bride-to-be on her wedding night… Then she started talking about this story of Gilgamesh which I didn’t know, so then I looked up the legend of Gilgamesh and it was pre the Bible, but it was a creation story that was very similar to the Bible in a way…One of the reasons God made another creature for Gilgamesh to do shit with was they complained that Gilgamesh was demanding the right to sleep with their wives on their wedding nights. So my narrative starts off when an ex I’m close with comes to town and, surprising to me, we end up hanging out and she admits she’s getting married, but basically wants to fuck… I listen to songs and [rappers’] sex lives are so triumphant and that isn’t always how my life [has gone]… In the second verse I wanted to give a couple different perspectives, maybe in the video it’ll be clearer, it’s the same character in a way, but a different scenario and situation… The “rattling medals” line is because Trujillo gave himself so many medals, I always thought that was funny. Like you’re the president and the head general and he had so many medals they called him bottle caps because you could hear him clicking wherever he would go. I like the idea of him still wearing them, he probably just unzipped his fly to smash with his epaulettes on!

– billy woods, Thought on Tracks