Butler later explained more clearly what he meant. In an interview with Mojo in 2013 he said that the song is basically about depression, except that at the time he himself did not really know the difference between depression and paranoia. As he put it, there was also the element of drugs. When you smoke dope, you can become completely paranoid around people, unable to relate to them, and then afterward fall into a heavy depressive phase. For him, the song came exactly out of that crossover, the intersection between the paranoia of dope and the melancholy and alienation that follow it.