Lou Christie's 1966 hit "Lightning Strikes" and reinterpret a pop song that would exploit Nomi's operatic range. Hoffman's arrangement of the song is relatively straight, with Nomi using "his piercing voice to subvert the lyrics' smarmy, swinging-bachelor heteronormativity," according to a Pitchfork review. "Hearing Klaus Nomi sing "Every boy wants a girl" is never not funny," it stated. Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" from 1963 has often been regarded as a feminist anthem, and Nomi's cover "lets the power of the original do most of the talking for him," Pitchfork opined. "From his pointed delivery of "Don't say I can't go with other boys!" to singing "I'm free and I love to be free" even higher than Gore did, he's simply making the same points in a shifted context." The album's third pop cover, "The Twist", is reinvented as a slow "bass-driven space-out" in which Nomi uses his "upper range and Germanic diction to make one of the most overplayed songs of all time sound disorientingly unfamiliar," Pitchfork said. Thinking that Nomi should have some original material, Hoffman started writing songs for him. "I sort of was the author of the original pop musical vision for Klaus", Hoffman said in 2008. "He of course knew everything about opera and I knew nothing, so all the classical pieces were his choice and his arrangement." First Hoffman wrote the new wave-ish "Nomi Song," which was "sort of like an easy joke on his name, "do you Nomi now," Hoffman said. "I really thought that Klaus was so fully formed that he needed to himself and what his intentions were in a pop format." Hoffman's "Total Eclipse" enters the same new wave territory as "Nomi Song," and with its "nuclear panic," Pitchfork stated, it "wouldn't feel out of place on a Devo record, except of course for the singing." Both songs were written with Nomi's sci-fi stage persona in mind. "I tried to think about who he would be in music as a character, kind of like thinking about Bowie," Hoffman said. "They were very Bowie-specific. I wanted him to have this big expansive-ism. I thought grandiosity was a good thing." Nomi's self-penned "Keys of Life", a "Bowiesque" track complete with synthesizer drones and multi-layered vocals, introduces an alien visitor with a message that's both messianic and apocalyptic about the future of Earth. The album's second side finds examples of Nomi's operatic