Buckley explained the title: "Plainly speaking, it's a euphemism for a dropper full of smack that you shoot in your arm."
When Buckley was a part of Gary Lucas' band Gods & Monsters, he wrote an early version of this song with Lucas, who contributed most of the music. Gods & Monsters fell apart amid tensions between Buckley and Lucas, but Buckley included a new version of "Mojo Pin" on his 1994 debut solo album, the only album released in his lifetime (he died in 1997). A demo of the Gods & Monsters version recorded in 1991 appears on the collection Songs to No One 1991-1992, which was released in 2002. The song "Grace," which Buckley also wrote with Lucas, also appears on the compilation.
Craig Wedren, whose band Shudder To Think was one of Buckley's favorites, got an early listen to "Mojo Pin" from Andy Wallace, who produced the Grace album. "It was like, 'Oh. This is generational,'" Wedren told Greg Prato. "When you hear beauty at that level, that combination of gifted technical, transcendent... I've known a lot of really great singers and great composers and musicians, and he was the best of all those things."
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