Using the radio recordings he made, and developing on his "mental edits", he sequenced the various complaints he heard on radio shows and crossed them with things he heard on documentaries—sometimes specific words like "anesthetic" or "ether"—and used them as the starting point of the album. After gathering enough sampled, fragmented conversation, he found he would not be able to "finish the thought" by listening to the rest of the transmissions, and instead "finished off the ideas" by adding in a lot of the details himself. He later claimed he made up a lot of the quotations used in the title track himself, having been unable to find the right words on the radio that he needed.
