The band's roots lie in the San Francisco Bay Area coffeehouse and open mic circuit, where Baker performed for several years while writing the material that would appear on "Interstate Medicine".
In early 2001, former Counting Crows and Third Eye Blind drummer Steve Bowman brought Baker together with producer Jeffrey Wood (Fatboy Slim, Penelope Houston), and sessions for the album began at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California.
Chief among these are Jef Labes (Van Morrison, Bonnie Raitt) on keys and Robert Powell (Peter Gabriel, John Lee Hooker, Jackson Browne) on pedal steel guitar.
The album's songs address a diverse range of topics, from Spanish conquistadores to double murders, deals with the devil to nights spent in thrall to Mexican witches.
Instrumentation is similarly diverse: the opening track, "Cortez & Pizarro", begins with rubato flamenco guitar which transforms abruptly into distorted Les Paul through a Marshall stack.