Over My Head

King's X frontman dUg Pinnick wrote this rocker from the band's second album. The lyrics were inspired by his grandmother, who brought music into his life. "It's like a negro spiritual," he said in King's X: The Oral History. "It was an old thing: Over my head, I hear music in the air There must be a God somewhere It's an old gospel thing that I grew up listening to all my life. And when I wrote the song, all I could hear was, 'Over my head, I hear music in the air.' And I went, Oh, Lord, music over my head. But I kind of figured, well, I'm not going to say, 'There must be a God somewhere.'"

Structurally, "Over My Head" was inspired by the Lenny Kravitz song "Let Love Rule." "The way Lenny Kravitz wrote that song, it was real 'Beatle sensible,'" Pinnick said in a Songfacts interview. "It had this real Beatle vibe to it, but when you got to the chorus, the song was building, building, building up for the chorus. But all of a sudden, he comes into 'let love rule,' and it didn't bring it up, it brought it down. That was the first time I ever heard a chorus that was anticlimactic, but it works. So when I wrote 'Over My Head,' when I got to, 'Music, oh, oh, oh, lord,' I purposely left it at that level just to be like Lenny Kravitz."

Pinnick came up with the track for this song on a Mattel drum pad five years before King's X recorded it. He recorded it onto cassette, then played that cassette back, adding parts he recorded on another player - very rudimentary multi-track recording. He thought it "sucked" and didn't didn't play it for anyone until one day when he and his bandmates were going through their old demos looking for material for the Gretchen Goes To Nebraska album. He was going to skip over the song, but guitarist Ty Tabor convinced him to play it. Pinnick was shocked when they all loved it. He added lyrics, the band worked up the song, and it became one of their most popular selections, played at most of their live shows.