Get Behind Me Satan

Jack began demoing songs on a microcassette recorder in 2004 and early 2005 and wrote around 35. He decided to make the album less than a month before the February 2005 sessions. They took about two weeks at his home in Indian Village, which the liner notes call Third Man Studios, with Matthew Kettle engineering on a Studer 8-track and a rented Steinway grand piano in the foyer. The reported cost was under $10,000. The band thought the sessions cursed, since the tape machine and microphones broke down and water dripped from the ceiling, but things improved by the time they recorded Blue Orchid near the end. John Hampton and Jack mixed the record at Ardent Studios and Howie Weinberg mastered it. Jack described it as a farewell to parts of his own personality that he no longer wanted to see.

Jack swapped the electric guitar for piano, mandolin and acoustic guitar on all but three tracks and played a marimba on The Nurse. Meg added bells, maracas and tambourines to her drumming. Jack said on the radio show Fresh Air that truth is the number one theme. The title echoes Matthew 16:23. The cover and liner photographs were taken by Ewen Spencer in a five-day shoot at Jack's home.

The album entered the Billboard 200 and the UK chart at number three, sold over 920,000 copies in the US, and won the 2006 Grammy for Best Alternative Album. Pitchfork's Matthew Murphy called it a bold, bewildering fifth album that wears its transitional album tag like a heavy peppermint-striped crown. Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone wrote, "Satan, you got served." David Browne of Entertainment Weekly gave it a C+. It was not released on vinyl until 2015. A deluxe twentieth anniversary edition with alternate takes, demos and live recordings was announced, and a limited vinyl reissue came out on 27 June 2025.