Possum Kingdom is a lake in Texas, near the Dallas/Fort Worth area where the band is from - it even has its own Chamber of Commerce There are no mentions of possums or kingdoms in the lyrics, but we do hear a creepy story about a spooky walk around a lake.In a 1995 interview withmagazine, Toadies lead singer Todd Lewis, who wrote the song, said: "It's just a story I heard long ago; it's just a really cool, eerie lake, and some stuff I heard and some stuff I just make up. I tend to do that. They dammed up this big river up there, and it's got all these spooky names like Hell's Gate. It's really cool."Lewis went on to say that there was supposedly a real stalker in Tyler, Texas who became a folk hero: "I was down there for Thanksgiving, and after the family got through talking about who died and who's got cancer and all those things that families talk about, they started talking about this guy who was peeping in windows and started breaking into people's houses. He'd go out of his way to be seen, and everyone is like armed to the teeth, and he's like tapping on windows. The whole family was freaked out about it."

Toadies had the briefest possible stay on the US Top 40, nicking the chart at #40 with this song the week of November 18, 1995. The song made it thanks to airplay, which Billboard factored into the charts starting in 1991. Toadies, and this song in particular, benefited from the boom in the "Modern Rock" or "Alternative" radio formats, which gave a good home to acts like Belly, Letters To Cleo and Blind Melon. Toadies toured with Bush for nearly a year to promote the Rubberneck album, which was their first major label release (Interscope/Atlantic). They made a second album, called Feeler , but it was rejected by the record company. Bass player Lisa Umbarger left the group, and they broke up soon after, orphaning their mid-'90s success. Toadies came back together in the '00s and released the album No Deliverance in 2008, which they followed with a new version of the previously shelved Feeler in 2010.

In the film Dark Secrets: The Stories of Rubberneck, Todd Lewis talked about writing this song. "In my teens and, I guess, my 20s, I would go to Possum Kingdom Lake where my family has some land and it was just really cool and creepy and just a really interesting place. Names like Hell's Gate and Devil's Island and all this weird nomenclature that just kind of lends itself to that kind of storytelling.



I was reading a lot of Stephen King and similar type horror fiction and every dark thing that I could read, so that song is about a character that's kind of stuck in another world, out floating around Possum Kingdom Lake. He's lonely and freaked out and just wanting to lure somebody else into his little realm. This guy wants to convince somebody else to do what he did, which is to burn themselves alive in order to be this other thing.



The essence of that is taking something that is beautiful and whole and destroying it in order to create something else. That's why in the video there's a creepy guy with a block of ice and he's creating this ice sculpture which will just be beautiful for just a moment and then it's going to melt and just be nothing. It's weird. It's how my brain works."