Work on this is about putting yourself out on a limb, playing the long odds. When someone gets into something like music or decides to focus a large part of their time and energy into an artistic pursuit, the chance of any level of success are pretty remote regardless of how good your mum and friends tell you you are. So it’s a song about the fun side of being a musician and having the dream, and dreaming about living it. The achieving of any level of success is of course not why we do it, but you’d be a liar if you denied it was an attractive notion. Touring, the indescribable buzz of kicking ass onstage with the crowd eating out of your hands, selling millions, you know the whole fairy tale. My brother won $200,000 on a scratchie, we all know someone to whom something has happened against the long odds. This could be extreme good luck or even extreme bad luck. Winning the lottery could just as easily be getting terminal cancer at twenty years of age.

But this song is really about putting yourself in the game. Placing yourself in the pool. You’ll never win lottery if you don’t buy the ticket. Life is a bell curve. The vast majority of people live a fairly mundane existence from A to Z, there's nothing wrong with that of course but on the edges of the bell are those to whom extraordinary things happen. What is the difference? This question is the proverbial rabbit hole, hence the line “we ain't in kansas anymore”. Do we just have things happen to us or do we make things happen? Sure very few people get hit by lightning, but what if you walked out into a storm holding a huge metal rod? But it’s the journey not the destination that important, and if you don’t take that stance youre likely to go insane if the fairytales do not materialise.

This song began as a drumbeat by Scott. We saved it in a file and called it “work on this”, and the guitar riff was a couple of chords stolen from another of our songs just appended to that rythym. The chorus lyric of 'madmans got the matches, batten down the hatches' was from another, much earlier song as was the little eastern sounding bit in the middle which is doubled by the guitar and voice. It’s a fun song to play live.