Nick Young talks about the meaning behind the songs of A.i.’s 2002 DreamWorks debut album, Artificial Intelligence.

“Bottoms Up”: This song has a lot of references to the “Kama Sutra.”  I thought my first girlfriend dumped me because I wasn’t a good enough lover, so I read all these books on tantra and made myself crazy over the whole thing.  The lyrics to “Bottoms Up” are almost a rebellion against the norms of electronic music, which can be so serious and pretentious.  We have a playful side and I felt, what better way to express that than to sing about a really sexy girl’s butt?

“One Man’s War”: I wrote this during the most stressful period of my life, when we were first recording and I felt nothing was coming together.  It’s about a guy we see every night on the news racing down the freeway with helicopters chasing him.  That can make you laugh at this point – there are just so many of them – but it’s distressing because it’s a person’s life.  A lot of these guys commit suicide at the end of their chase.  I started to think, “If I had five helicopters chasing me, I don’t know if I could stop; with so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I might just keep driving.”  How can you think logically – “Oh, pull to the side of the road” – in that situation?  Once you’ve already started, how can you stop?

“Alien Sex”: I think my favorite sexual partners have been the ones who were freaky and did freaky things.  Sex truly has the ability to put you in a different world.

“Soul Rescue”: One of my closest friend’s mom passed away and the music at her funeral was gospel.  It was so powerful, the way it built.  It was the most emotional music I’ve ever come across.  This song explores the way music can elevate us.  It reminds us of the process of spiritual evolution, that there’s a reason we’re here.

“There You Go”: This is another playful song.  The lyrics were inspired by Pablo’s keyboard line, which sounds like a little kid’s song, a song of discovery, about going into the unknown.

“Laughter”: [Writer] Joseph Campbell says laughter tickles the outer boundaries of our consciousness.  I was inspired to write this by Native American song.  A lot of their lyrics are just sounds, emotional vocalization – they’re called vocables.  I use some of that here.  Also, in Native American ceremonies, the deities are represented by a clown, a joyous laughing figure, which I love.

“Forever”: I was going through a breakup when I wrote this, and I had this sick feeling in my stomach.  It felt like it would never go away.  I was thinking about Egypt and the pyramids.  In the Egyptians’ view, eternity begins after you die, but I was feeling like mine had already started.

“Say You’ll Stay”: I was in the middle of writing the lyrics to this song, about an ex-lover, when one of my best friends died in a plane crash.  I couldn’t stop thinking about the feeling of going down in a plane and how scary that must have been for him.  Yeats talks a lot about our memories being like reflections and shadows, and that concept ended up influencing this song.

“She Says”: After a star dies, its light still reaches us for millions of years.  That’s kind of like a relationship that dies away, but there’s still feeling there long after.  My relationships have often been confusing, with the girl saying one thing and then something else.  It’s infuriating, but then I miss the relationship as soon as it’s over.

“Caught In Da Fire”: I have a lot of nightmares about being chased.  This song is about that,  about being caught in the heat of the moment, struggling to get somewhere, get something done, and having people after you.

“Danger”: I see danger as going hand-in-hand with discovery, with exploration.  This song is really about our band – we like to go where the danger is, where it’s exciting, where you learn the most.  In the song, an astronaut is going towards the sun, which is, of course, very dangerous but also so seductive.

“Where We Go”: The title is a reference to where we go in relationships.   We go on a lot of stormy trips trying to understand one another.  I had a girlfriend who kept saying that I didn’t understand her.  What I’m expressing here are feelings of frustration and wanting to say, “Then you better find a way to make me understand you – try harder.”

“Whale Song”: My dad was friends with Carl Sagan, who wrote the novel “Contact.”  They used to talk about these experiments being done by astronomers, where satellites were sent into space to try to communicate with other life forms.  There was much debate about what to put on these satellites, and they ended up putting whale songs out into space.  Maybe the whole purpose of human evolution was to get to a place where we could send the cry of the whale out there to someone who could understand it.