Woman on the Tier came about because I got a fax from Tim Robbins, who was looking for people to write music inspired by the film he was working on called "Dead Man Walking". So even though it's not in the film, it is inspired by film. He sent me a rough-cut of the film to watch. But I was really inspired more by the book, which I went out and bought, because I wanted to see what kind of language Sister Helen Prejean would use herself to describe her own feelings and her own situation. That's what excites me is language. So when I bought the book I was very excited because she's a beautiful writer. And there's the one moment where she come to the jail for the very first time and she's about to meet the killer that she has been writing letters to. I could see, I could feel from reading the book I could feel her language change. I could feel that she must have been very tense in that situation, she must have been feeling a lot of anxiety, because her language became very poetic, her language started to rhyme and had certain kinds of rhythms here and there. And so, writing the song was fairly simple, it took me about a day to go in and edit what was already there, so almost all the words are her words, they're just rearranged over this intense rhythms. And again I like that rhythms, because to me it had all that clanging and the atmosphere that you would find in a jail, where the doors are slamming closed and there's a lot of metal and people shouting and that was the kind of atmosphere that I wanted for that song.
In concert: El Rey Theater, Los Angeles, CA, USA, November 20, 1996 (http://www.vega.net/elreytr96.htm) transcription by William C. Andrews