“I remember asking if there was another way of expressing whether God was ‘just a slob like one of us’ – but he insisted that line would grab people’s attention”: How a catchy and idiosyncratic track became a ’90s classic covered by Prince

Joan Osborne.

One night in January 1994, Eric Bazilian was sitting in his Philadelphia home with his girlfriend Sarah, who he had met when his band The Hooters played two festivals in Sweden. The pair were watching The Making Of Sgt Pepper on TV.

“That documentary is mostly George Martin sitting at the Abbey Road four-track console,” said Bazilian in an interview with Songfacts. “I pointed at the mass of wires sitting on my dining room table, which was my Portastudio, and said, ‘There you go, that's four-track recording technology for you.'