This song was inspired by the characters of the joker and the thief from the Bob Dylan song, "All Along the Watchtower." In this new interpretation, the thief is a girl - a "thief in the night."
In an interview with ultimate-guitar.com, Wolfmother frontman Andrew Stockdale said: "I've totally ripped it off from Dylan. I was in a shop one morning walking into where we jam. I saw this AC/DC 'Thunderstruck' and I was like, 'I want to write a stadium rock song.' I went into the studio and said, 'Doo-duh-lee, doo-duh-lee. What's the best thing to do after that? Just do something cleaner - Doo, doo, doo.' Because, you know, you've got to have a big intro and then you have to have a balls-to-the-wall riff to knock it on the head in the next stage."
This is the most popular track on the first Wolfmother album, and the band's highest-charting single in their native Australia, where it made #8. In his Songfacts interview, Andrew Stockdale explained that he brought 15 songs to the studio for the band to work on for the album, and it was after working on these 15 that he came up with this song. "At the tail end of all this energy and creative flow, I just quickly grab some ideas," he said. "'Joker & the Thief' was at the end of all that writing."
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