Angst in My Pants

Russell Mael told Trouser Press in 1990 how the song came about. An earlier song of the same name, with a different melody, had been dropped because they did not like it much. With every other track recorded, they were one song short, and in the hotel in Munich Ron came up with a new melody and stuck the old title onto it. Producer Mack really liked it and they recorded it.

It opens the album and was used in the 1983 film Valley Girl and, later, in the Showtime series Yellowjackets. Pitchfork's Stuart Berman called it the best of their early-1980s singles, a ticking-time-bomb 4/4 beat behind a yacht-riding yuppie's impotence-induced midlife crisis. Sparks played it at Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, on 23 April 1983, in a recording later shared on the Internet Archive.