Taste in Men

This song is about longing for the partner you have hurt to come back and forgive you. But the singer also wants this person to be bisexual like he is ("change your style again"). Reason for wanting this person back: "It's been this way since Christmas day, dazzled doused in gin." Placebo lead singer Brian Molko is bisexual.

In a 2000 interview, Molko explained the song's meaning: "I guess it's quite a sonically complicated song, but lyrically it's very simple - being the classic old story of love lost. The person in the song is suffering from this obsessional pining and feeling of torment that follows you from the moment you wake up to the very moment you go to sleep. It's ever present, it's right in your face and affects your ability to function or do anything properly. It's a kind of pain that absorbs every aspect of your personality and every molecule in your body and the person is so desperate that they are willing to do anything possible, or change themselves in any way to win this person back, which is obviously a very unhealthy state of mind and being, emotionally. Sonically I think the sound reflects the pain."

Molko told LA Weekly the pain and desperation of a breakup "needed to be reflected in the sonics of the song, so we tried to make it as hard as the Broken EP by Nine Inch Nails, blisteringly nasty." The band felt particularly inspired by the track "Wish."