Billy Jack

Billy Jack opens the album. The Quietus described a convict who, on the day of his release, learns that an old friend has been shot, and heard in it a tremulous piece of butterfly funk, as if Billy Jack's death were too predictable to be truly mourned. The lyric sums up the man in a few lines: in the city they called him Boss Jack, and down home he was an alley cat. Matt Mitchell of Paste noted that critics have inferred the protagonist is a convict, and wrote that Lucky Scott's liquid, wah-wah bassline and Rich Tufo's horn arrangement are part of the song.

Alexis Petridis of the Guardian wrote that it deals with the kind of drug-related ghetto murder Mayfield had pictured in Freddie's Dead, but this time with a sad, fatalistic shrug at how long the man lived.