Tennessee

Arrested Development frontman Speech, whose real name is Todd Thomas, wrote this song. Says Speech: "I wrote it because my older brother, his name is Terry Thomas, he and I met up in Tennessee for my grandmother – my favorite grandmother of all time – for her funeral. And that same week my brother left and went back to college, and I went back to college. And my brother died that same week. And that song was probably the first step of me recovering from the loss of two people that are just extremely close and dear to me. The chorus is 'take me another place, take me to another land, make me forget all that hurts me and help me understand your plan.' It's like a prayer to God. And just talking about sort of my journey in life, and that the last place I saw these important people in my life was in Tennessee."

This was Arrested Development's first single. At a time when gangsta rap was the big trend, they went in another direction, as Speech used a melodic rap style that made their songs more accessible. Along with "People Everyday" and "Mr. Wendal," this was one of three US Top 10 hits from the album.

This samples the 1988 Prince song "Alphabet Street," but just the word "Tennessee." Speech explains that he didn't clear the sample: "I didn't know to in 1991, the sample laws weren't very clearly set out back then. It was our first record, we definitely weren't vets in the industry, we didn't understand all the game play and the rules. So we didn't ask for permission. I learned as a producer pretty quickly the laws of sampling: it's the wild, wild West out there. So what happened was the record obviously was getting some pretty good heat. MTV had a show called Buzz Clips, and they added it and it just became this huge phenomenon. And as the song moved up the chart the album got to #3 on the pop charts. And once it went down, the very week it went to #4, we got a call from Prince's representation. They waited for that song to sell as many possible copies as they could wait for. As soon as it started to go down the charts we got a call, and the Reaper became the reaped. So we got charged for that sample pretty heavily. I paid $100,000 for that word."