The album version of this song runs 8:35 seconds, with an instrumental intro that lasts over 4 minutes. The radio edit is clipped to less than 4 minutes, and was the first single from Narrow Stairs.
This psychedelic song with its delayed vocal entry was a different style for the band. Frontman Ben Gibbard explained to gigwise.com how it came about: "As Nick (Harmer) put the bass line in we started kind of playing with the song. The idea was that we just kind of played it and let the themes kind of build and when it feels right really dive into the lyrics… and it just so happened that that was five minutes into the song. As it was going down on tape we realized that we had never presented a song this way before, but I hope people accept it from us, I don't think it's such a wild departure that we'll lose people."
Gibbard wrote in an article in Pulse magazine: "The single on our record is a work of fiction that was inspired by things that happened to some people close to me. It's called 'I Will Possess Your Heart,' and it's eight-and-a-half minutes long. It's five minutes of build and then a three-minute song. The song is basically about a stalker. It's about this nice guy who wants this girl he can't have, and he believes they'll be together once she realizes how great he is-he just has to wait it out. That's the part that makes the song really creepy, the delusion of thinking that they were meant to be together. It's a really dark song."
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