"Alex came to practice one day in the spring of '01 with a really cool motif on bass that I took home and played around with and eventually came up with a big pretentious two-part idea for. The first part would be a middle eastern-sounding instrumental jam called 'Ether' that would culminate in a big drum solo, which would then lead immediately into a stretched-out, heavy Toolish song using the bassline from the first part, titled 'Ethereal'. The two parts were supposed to close out Ass Prison, but ultimately I just wasn't good enough of a songwriter to work out the second part of the idea. I really bit off more than I could chew, and ended up writing 'Black Rain' after the first day of recording the album because we needed something to close the album with.

With Braintree the song is alive and very well. It's a three-part mini-suite, going from the introduction of the motif into a middle part with a ballsy fucking riff, into the recapitulation at the beginning of the climax. The last riff is an all-out affair, which leads into the best song ending I've ever written. If we ever get to play it live, we're fucked if it's anywhere other than the very last song in the set, the only song that even comes close to rivaling it in terms of climax is 'Taste of the Morning'."