Don't Drink the Water

This is about the European slaughter of Native Americans, as the colonization of North America caused the near-extinction of the Native American populace. Matthews said of the song: "There's times when I've traveled around this fine country, and others, but this fine country, I remember one time standing at the edge of Lake Superior, up there, we were camping up on the northern side of it and looking out and imagining these little rocks that jut out, families of people going past in canoes and hunting on the side of the lake there, and also like if you sit and look at the Grand Canyon and get a little distance between you and that McDonald's that's peering down over the canyon with you, and just imagine the quiet that must have been there and the people that enjoyed it before we came, and I just get awed because it's sort of an overwhelming feeling looking at those things just going, 'Man does that suck, does it suck.' That you could erase somebody, ya know? Take somebody's whole universe away. It's just unbelievable for those people... just the fact that a little bit of our history has a lot of poison in it and that maybe we can't reverse things but maybe pay a little tribute to it every once and a while."

Alanis Morissette performed backing vocals at the conclusion of the song, and Bela Fleck of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and The New Grass Revival played the banjo.

Unlike their previous efforts, the band had no idea what they were doing with the album when they headed into the studio. Matthews booked studio time before he had any songs written, so the pressure was on to create something from scratch. What followed was lots of experimentation from each band member to figure out what did and didn't work. It especially took awhile to figure out this track, which became the album's lead single. "'Don't Drink The Water' kicked our asses," Matthews recalled in MTV's documentary about the album. "We all hated it, and then we were all in bad moods, furious." Once producer Steve Lillywhite played it back to them, however, the band realized the song's potential and it became a fast favorite.