“Prisoner” by 311

"Prisoner" sits second on 311's Transistor, out on Capricorn in 1997, and was the album's second single, a loose, rolling reggae-rock groove that sounds easy until you listen to what it's saying. Nick Hexum wrote the music and shared the lyrics with S.A. Martinez: a song about feeling boxed in, and about somebody who has stopped being themselves.

P-Nut's bass does the heavy lifting, Chad Sexton keeps the drums crisp, Tim Mahoney and Hexum trade guitar lines, and Martinez scratches in from the turntables. The band produced it with Scott Ralston, who also recorded and mixed it. Martinez named it his favorite 311 song in a 1999 interview. The video, shot in Los Angeles, cuts between the band playing in a basement with uniformed men lurking behind them and a woman slipping into a cold, lidded pool, where the band ends up too.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.