Sometime after he started at Gordon College and before he got married, probably not long after he wrote Free, and probably to some degree inspired by the same Conrad Gempf whose frenetic guitar stylings

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inspired that song, Mark wrote this one.  His first clear memories of it are playing it for Janet at the wedding of one of his cousins, before they were married.

It has the syncopated dotted quarters against three-four time that he used in the other song (and in another, a slower song, years before), this time transitioning to two-four and then shifting to four-four, but it's done with more power and choppy pounding chords on the verses.  It was so driving that the bridge almost had to be something gentler, and when he came out of the bridge he faced a problem.  He felt that at that moment it needed an exciting instrumental verse, but he was in a position in which for the foreseeable future he expected to be a solo act.  Thus he wrote a vocal cadenza, the main voice part for one verse and one chorus before doing the final verse.  When he played the song for Janet, she said that he could make that two parts, and he said no, he couldn't, but since she thought so he would try--and he succeeded in turning the complicated verse part into a two-part fugue, merging into parallel vocals in the chorus part.

In its original form, it ended with the end of the second bridge; in TerraNova he was pressured to add a tag, based on the vocal instrumental, and so added a few upbeat measures built on the verse with pieces of the fugue.  He used it, too, with Cardiac Output, where he also set up the trading verses on the first two verses and trading lines on the last.  Still preferring the gentler ending, and knowing that the vocals were already difficult, he went back to the gentler ending with Collision.

The song was originally slated for inclusion on the Of Worlds EP, but the second vocal on the fugue, already challenging as written, was even more difficult sung an octave lower in Jonathan's range, so the song was cut.  When Sara joined the band, she picked up the vocal on the fugue, managing it impressively despite the challenge to her range and the intricacies of the part.