Ballad of Cable Hogue

The second track on Hot Rail, with Ruben Moreno on trumpet, Madeleine Sosin on violin and Marianne Dissard singing. PopMatters heard in it Calexico's most memorable and imaginative songwriting. Burns plays a character who says he lives out yonder where the snakes and scorpions run, and the song nods to Sam Peckinpah's 1970 revisionist western of the same title, set in Arizona, though PopMatters noted that this Cable Hogue is not quite the character Jason Robards played.

Dissard is a French-born singer-songwriter and her verses are in French, which gave the song, in PopMatters' words, aspects of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra or Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, with a hapless protagonist and a femme fatale. Its dramatic climax delivers laughs.

Afterlife

Ballad of Cable Hogue had its own single release in 2000. It and Service and Repair were used in the 2001 German comedy Lammbock. The song was in the set at the Barbican in London on 27 November 2002, which was filmed and released as World Drifts In.