I think it was inspired by seeing somebody with those two oppositional fashion gestures. And that's sort of what the song is about, directly oppositional forces housed within the same mechanism or personage. I saw this woman as trying to arrive at balance -- the skirt going up and the jacket going down.

Ironically, for more than a decade the roots-rockers worked overtime trying to market their own music. The industry, for the most part, wasn't buying. Despite a brief, two-album run with Rick Rubin's American Recordings in the mid-Nineties, the band toiled for years on the...