Multiple songs from
The Raw & the Cooked debuted long before their release on the album; the band's cover of
Buzzcocks' "
Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've)" originally appeared on the soundtrack for the 1986
Jonathan Demme film
Something Wild. Three other songs from the album—"
Good Thing", "Tell Me What" and "As Hard as It Is"—first appeared in the 1987 film
Tin Men, where the Fine Young Cannibals portrayed a band in a nightclub. These three songs have a retro-
soul style consistent with the film's 1963
Baltimore setting. At this point, the band were beginning to move away from their "Sixties soul sound", but
Tin Men director
Barry Levinson persuaded the band to retain the sound on the songs. With these songs, the band had already written and recorded enough songs for one half of the album between their contributions to the two films. The rest of the band,
David Steele and
Andy Cox, however, formed the side-project duo Two Men, a Drum Machine and a Trumpet, an
acid house-inspired project which was described as "high-tech" and "danceable." Nonetheless, Fine Young Cannibals reconvened soon afterwards to focus their attention on writing and recording the remainder of
The Raw & the Cooked. David Z recalled that "they wanted to work with Prince for their next record. They were told that Prince doesn't work with anybody that way, as a producer-for-hire. But they were also told there was someone who works with Prince who does. That was me, and they were willing to try it out." MCA suggested that the band record the tracks they wished to create with Z at Paisley Park Studios so that they "would have no choice but to work and get the record done", after the label told Z in a meeting that the band, "then living in London, had been taking an unusually long time between their first and second records." Furthermore, the unique
snare drum "pop" sound on "She Drives Me Crazy" was created by Z recording the snare drum portion separately. A speaker was then placed on top of the snare drum, and a microphone below. The original recording of the snare drum part was played back through the speaker and re-recorded. Reflecting on creating the snare sound with
Mix in 2001, David Z said: "I took the head off a snare drum and started whacking it with a wooden ruler, recording it through a
Shure 57 microphone. As I did that, I started twisting the hell out of the [API 550]
EQ around 1 kHz on it, to the point where it was starting to sound more like a crash. I blended that with a snare I found in the
Linn itself, which was a
12-bit machine, so it sounded pretty edgy to start with." Dan Daley of the website added: Also given complex treatment on the track were the "
staccato single-note lines" of the guitars, which "were actually layered six deep, with a few chords thrown in here and there. Some of the lines and chords were actually recorded only once, then manually triggered from a
sampler during playback and mixing. One of the lines was also played back through an underwater pool-type speaker Z had laying around, then re-recorded to tape, giving it a muted, mysterious quality that no onboard or outboard EQ could mimic;" Z stated that "what really made the guitars stand out, though, was that as Andy [Cox] was playing to chord parts, I was slowly twisting the EQ from one extreme to the other, giving it this wah effect, so every part on the record has a very individual and unique sound. But there aren't many parts at all, so the space between them becomes part of the sound." == Lyrics and vocals ==