Ohio

This was originally a song that Lambchop pianist Tony Crow wrote for his wife. Lambchop mainman Kurt Wagner explained to The Village Voice how he transformed it into this track: "Knowing that it was like a Valentine he had written to his wife, I sort of would sort of piece together these little images of what maybe his marital bliss is all about. And so I have this sort of domestic imagery in my mind and I just sort of would cherry-pick ideas from that. Whether it was: his wife makes his lunch and she puts his name on the bag; or she puts his kids' name on the lunch bag. I don't know. Just the morning paper, stuff like that. So it was like putting together little pieces of imagery like that and trying to find sort of a blankness of a choice of word like 'Ohio' to sort of express that. Just the sort of mood without really getting into anything too mushy."

Pitchfork Media asked Wagner why he titled the album Oh (Ohio). He replied: "It's just one of those instances where it fit in a nice way, but doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the record other than it's the title of the opening track."

Wagner explained the album cover to Pitchfork Media: "It was a painting that a professor of mine named Michael Peed had made. He was part of my graduate committee at school. In a lot of ways he was very influential in what I became as a visual artist. I had lost track of him over the years, and on the solo tour, around the time we were starting the new record, I ran into him in Barcelona. We reconnected and he came to the show, and I asked him to send me what he'd been working on lately. So he sent me a series of these paintings, which he called the Chaos and Tranquility series or something. I liked them very much, and as time went on, when I started thinking about what we would use for the record cover, it just seemed like a good idea to contact him and see if he was into letting us use a couple of those for the artwork."