Tyler

Written by Toadies lead singer/guitarist Todd Lewis, this song is about a stalker in the town of Tyler, Texas, or at least the folklore about it. Tyler is outside of Dallas, near where the band is from. According to Lewis, his family would sit around and tell greatly exaggerated stories about local lore, and the Tyler stalker made a particularly intriguing tale. The story was that even though citizens had their guns ready for this guy, the stalker would go out of his way to make sure he was seen, even tapping on windows to get noticed. The song is written from the perspective of this peeping tom.

This song was released as a single, and while it did get a lot of airplay on Modern Rock radio stations, it didn't do nearly as well as their song "Possum Kingdom." Both songs were similar in their creepy subject matter and videos, which contained scenes that would fit nicely on CSI. Neither song mentioned the title in the lyrics, which was not a good marketing strategy in the '90s when there was no easy way to find out the name of a song you were hearing on the radio. Toadies may have followed up their Rubberneck album with a hit, but they never had the chance - their next album was rejected by their record company and the band broke up.

In the film Dark Secrets: The Stories of Rubberneck, Todd Lewis talk about coming up with this song. "My grandparents lived in East Texas where my dad grew up on a farm and we would go visit them for holidays. Inevitably, around the table, they would start talking about what's going on, and one of the conversations turned to some guy who had been spotted running around these farmhouses in East Texas and peeking in windows and how he's probably going to break into a house sooner or later and nab somebody or do something terrible. I look over at the window. Yeah, that'd be creepy if a guy peeked in. Then I look over the other way and there's a rifle rack with eight shotguns on it. I'm thinking, every one of these houses is armed to the teeth. These people stay alive, they hunt and they protect their property. And I just went, 'There's no way this guy's for real.' Then years later I was thinking back on that and thinking, 'Well, I think that was just some hysteria going on, but what if the guy was real and what would he be thinking and what would he do?' So, that's what I wrote 'Tyler' about: this guy, his thought process about being in love with somebody – so in love that he would go risk life and limb to just be with this person."