This song was written expressly for Ann Hammer's cat, Pete. I never thought I was much for felines until she barged her way into our residence, much as she's seen busting through the paper window shade at the beginning of "The vonHummer Hour's" first 29 episodes. Pete's a Russian Blue, still alive as of this writing (to the best of my knowledge) but surely getting old. The tune was leftover from 1993 when the original lyrics were the Beach Boys' "Fun Fun Fun." To replace those lyrics, I sat down early one Saturday morning in the Fall of 2005 and wrote "Cat Lover," with the idea of a lover being very cat-like: exasperating to live with, but beloved none the less. In writing this one, I realized that I shared a lot of catty traits with Pete. And again, what animal is more of a loner than the cat? Fits right into the album theme.

Along with my acceptance of the beauty and uniqueness of my own playing, a first for this album—I've had trouble with the self love thing—I came to realize something very profound in pondering cats. They're perhaps the most useless of domestic creatures. Like pampered princesses, they mostly lie around all day, serving no one but themselves. Their affection is selective and given grudgingly. There's a definite beauty and grace they lend to any environment when they're feeling poseable, offset sometimes by bizarro and hilarious misbehavior. Shiftless and ignorant, the cat. Especially compared to the hard-working, loyal, sycophantic dog. And yet...this is how the Creator made the cat. A cat can be beloved, but you must accept that creature as is, and see the beauty and comedy and decadence as god-given. In realizing this, I realized that I, too, am a creature of luxury, like the cat, and not a service animal, like the dog. And my lifetime of kicking myself for being a lazy, beautiful, bizarro cat instead of an ingratiating, loyal, hard-working dog was inherently wrong. I was made a cat for cat people, clearly. Let the dogs for dog people do what they do. I'm not one of them and that's okay. There's no judging the value of a creature by the hard labor they'll do for mankind. It's not like God loves a plow horse more than a scorpion. "...He who made kittens/put snakes in the grass..." as a great poet once wrote.

As I recorded this album, and especially this song, Pete was walking all over the place, trying to grab attention as was always her wont, vocalizing like crazy. You can hear her mewling away in this one if you listen carefully, and in the outtake song at the end, "Can I Get a Meow." She stopped me dead right there, with her infernal singing.