Treat Me Like Your Mother

Jack White and Alison Mosshart share vocals on this track, where they excoriate a love interest, asking this person to grow some manners and "treat me like your mother." It's loud and aggressive, typical of White and Mosshart's work in their other respective bands, The White Strips and The Kills. In The Dead Weather, they didn't dilly dally, writing songs in the studio and recording them quickly. This is how White likes to work but it took Mosshart some time to get used to. Instead of agonizing over her lyrics, she learned to just blurt them out. This kept up the intensity and let the words form around the music.

This was the second single from The Dead Weather's debut album, Horehound, following "Hang You From the Heavens." The band debuted both songs with a live performance on March 11, 2009 at the opening of Jack White's Third Man Records location in Nashville. Jack White is the drummer in the band, which threw some people off. In The White Stripes he did pretty much everything except play drums, which were (wo)manned by Meg White. But White started out as a drummer and even taught Meg how to play.

Alison Mosshart and Jack White told Billboard the Dead Weather origin story, which involves a lost voice and a missing tour bus. During the fall of 2008, Mosshart's band, The Kills, were opening for White's band, The Raconteurs, when White lost his voice. Meanwhile the Kills' tour bus driver had disappeared with the group's bus. Mosshart remembered: "I was wearing the same clothes I'd been in for a week, because the bus still hadn't been found." (It turned up a few days later). To get their minds off their misfortunes, White suggested an impromptu end-of-tour jam session at his new Third Man studio-label complex in Nashville. He explained: "We had one day left with her before she had to go to New York and we were in Nashville together so we said, 'Why don't we record a 7-inch?' We had absolutely no energy left and were completely burned out." Raconteur bassist Jack Lawrence and guitarist Dean Fertita, a member of Queens of the Stone Age who tours with The Raconteurs, made up the jam quartet. Mosshart recalled: "We burned the candle at three ends, and all of a sudden we had four songs done. And then we just kept going and going, and all of a sudden, we were this new band with this new record. I couldn't believe how kind of natural it felt."