"City in a Bag was originally written for the ILLTET around this time (1995), a favorite among our friends and a standard in the illness/NyQwill repertoire into the present . This song represents a certain carefree but still serious yearning for life. "City in a Bag, Bag in a Bathroom, Bathroom in a Bar, Bag inside a Bag inside a Bag"

The bar referenced still exists on the corner of Avenue C and east 7th street. I think the lyric was inspired by one of our regular vocal freestyle jam sessions, in which we would regularly engage in on the streets of the lower east side at night when we were out partying.

I remember a recurring "bag in a bag" chant with Mr. Taps and Mike iLL. I wrote the verses, and even the melody sitting in the grass in Tompkins Square Park, directly across the street from the bar and corner referenced in the song.

The musical idea came from a demo Mike had made on cassette 4-track, which I believe was a slide guitar riff, bass line and probably a loop. If I remember, the form of the song never changed from Mikes first demo. We added a time stretched sample of Mikes little brother screaming, Danny aka "Various", he was a baby when we took a bunch of samples of him screaming and used these on a few songs over the years. Boo, of course, took the slide guitar bit to a completely different level, as he always does. Boo also changed the first line of the song to, "Ive got it bad", Originally not what I was singing but that is what he heard, and it was better so I changed it.

The lyric represents a particular brand of party favor, popular in that neighborhood on Avenue C in the 1990's.

The song has been recorded about 4 times over the years. "City in a Bag, everybody's got a bag, everybody in the cites got a bag of they own" is simply a party joke about the bar on the corner but is also metaphor about people and about urban lifestyles. It nods to the multiple layers of trips and idiosyncrasies of city folks and about what's hidden and what's in plain sight." - Zef 2013 Newark

"To my ears, CIAB was the "single" from the album, the most hooky (tho still very dark and mysterious) of all the other songs from the batch. Indeed, the song marks the first appearance in all my discography of a B bender string-pull device along with drop D tuner. The altered guitar tuning that Mike and I created for that particular song as well as the use of bottle neck slide ON TOP of using the string-bender resulted in a guitar part that was about as "alternative" as you get...." - Boo