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Untitled Document
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER SONGMEANINGS
Blood (Empty Promises)
Jacoby: "“Blood” is kind of like a song that goes out to our fans and to the industry."
Not Listening
Jacoby: "Not Listening" is a track that comes from being a musician--it’s just natural to be rebellious and to go against the grain and always question authority. The more I’ve delved into learning about politics and what’s going on in the world, the more I sometimes think ignorance is bliss, because the more I find about all the shady shit that goes on in that world, the more paranoid I get and the more agitated I become. The lyric is "The more I learn, the more I ignore."
Lyrically, it’s about looking into media and what’s going on in the world today and it’s like it’s all half-truths. It’s never the entire story. It’s filtered. They’re saying, ‘Let’s feed America what we think they should eat.’ The more I look at all the aspects of the media and look at what’s going on with it, I realize that it’s all half-truths, and it’s not really the truth and that’s where the chorus comes from. When I turn on the news, it’s like, ‘Am I going to believe everything I see? Hell-motherfucking-no.’ Question the media. People need to do that. This political shit that’s going down right now is all shady, and people are okay with it, and I’m not. People either ignore it on purpose, or they’ve just been hoodwinked into believing that what’s going on now is the right thing to be doing.
Jerry: Yeah, it's a little more political. We're really just kind of trying to educate ourselves, and really mainly just encouraging kids to vote 'cause that's a right that we have and we should use. I'm going to vote. It's really important. You can't complain about the results if you didn't take part.
Take Me
Jacoby: "Take Me" is kind of about our position as a band--you know, we’re on the outside of everything looking in because we don’t really fit with any genre of music or any style of people. We’re just a rock band and it’s like we stand alone. This is a song that reaches out to people saying, "take us, let us in, understand us, believe in us."
This is a song that reaches out to people, saying, 'Take us, let us in, understand us, believe in us,' That's where our band is at right now. We're just the lone soldiers out here on tour doing it our own way. It feels good because it's a part of our career that we totally skipped in 2000, the part of your career where you go out and just work and build and pack houses off of kick-ass songs and a kick-ass record instead of all the hype.
To this day, like, I just think it's a really solid song and it's a powerful song, it's got a killer chorus and it rocks live, so...
Dave: I think it's a cool song to segue out of 'Scars' because it's got that big anthem hook.
Getting Away With Murder
Jacoby: I wrote it so you can take it in different ways. It can be about when you're doing some shit behind some people in your life's backs and they don't know about it but it makes you feel like shit, which I've done. But it can also be about what's going on right now in the political world [in the Middle East], or about these big, huge corporations who are so corrupt.
Every time we played it the kids were going crazy. It just translated live, and the fans latched onto it like fucking leeches.
For us, it was just like, when we were writing this riff, it had an industrial, metallic, rugged, insane vibe to it. So when we were producing the demo, we took and made a drum loop from Dave playing a beat live in a club, and put it on overdrive so it sounds all blasted-out, put it in with a regular beat, made a loop, and just started playing this riff over the loop, and worked on the chorus – which is fucking huge in this song – and it just became what it is. It’s like I said earlier, go where the music takes you and get into the character of the song. It’s this dark, ominous, groovy, evil-sounding song, and the ‘Getting away with murder’ line really seemed to fit the character of what that song was. So hence, the song is very different from a lot of the stuff on the record, but I don’t think any one song represents the album as a whole, you have to get into this piece of work we did to understand it. We don’t want to put out a record that’s carbon-copies of every song – ‘here’s the melody part, this is the scream, and here’s the melody again,’ and I think we succeeded – I don’t think it’s cookie-cutter, every song is very different.
Be Free
Jacoby: Let’s say it’s just straight about addiction and that’s just my song.
Scars
Jacoby: Some of our fans hear that song and say, 'I had to give it a few listens, dude. But I love it'. It's a P-Roach anthem. It has heart. It's just undeniable. It stems from a good night in Vegas turned bad. I ended up in the hospital with 11 staples in my head, self-mutilation. It was just a really bad night. It's about trying to help someone who really doesn't want you to help them.
Through music, I'm always trying to make sense of the confusion in my life. Whatever life throws at you, music is there for me, through the hard times and the good times. It's been something for me to confide in, because when you get right down to it, I'm not really good at confiding in people."
Tobin: I know lyrically for Coby it was about a night in Vegas gone really bad. The song is basically about having people around you suck you dry and expect things from you and want you to help them and realizing you have to be in the right mind frame yourself. You got to help yourself before you go out and help other people. You know what I mean?"
Blanket Of Fear
Jacoby: The lyric is like, "I am awake under this blanket of fear / And none of the people I see belong here." All this shit that’s fed to people through TV just keeps people scared and pacified with their fear. I don’t succumb to that. I’m thinking critically and that’s the first step in the right direction for myself. Several friends I hang with have a lot of the same beliefs I do. But at the same time we’re not trying to shove our political opinions down people’s throats. I remember when a friend was trying to turn me Christian. He was just shoving it down my throat and saying "oh you’re accountable and you’re going to go to hell" and this and that--it wasn’t very intriguing to me. We don’t want to be the band that states, "we are this and this is the only fucking way."
Tyranny Of Normality
Jacoby: I wanted to name our record Tyranny of Normality a couple of years ago. It was a line that stuck in my head and I wrote a song--it’s pretty much about "the death of outrage." I don’t understand why more people aren’t outraged about what’s going on in the world right now. It just seems like a lot of people are very complacent. Admittedly, I feel that way myself sometimes--I don’t know what to do or how to change the world. I’m just one human being, so I put my thoughts--and how I feel--into the music. So if we spark other people that feel the same way and they wake the fuck up, then that’s good.
Do Or Die
Jacoby: For us, that song is the mood swing within the song that really makes that chorus pop out. The verse is real dark and has this groovy riff and it’s kind of slimy, and then you go into this anthemic, pop-rock chorus, and it has major chords and stuff. I think the juxtaposition of the verse riff and the chorus make sit stand out huge. As far as the guitars go, we were just going for big. We achieved that shit. I think it’s the perfect song to be the last song on the record. It’s just like you go through all this crazy shit, these lyrics take you to all these different places, sometimes dark, sometimes uplifting, and the end is like, ‘It’s never too late to live your life, the time is now, it’s do or die,’ and through all of it, there’s clarity, so it kind of caps it off cool. I like that song a lot.
LOVEHATETRAGEDY SONGMEANINGS
M-80 (Explosive Energy Movement)
Jacoby: "M-80" is about letting you see the best and worst sides of me. The chorus is: "I'm strong and fearless only 'cuz I rock and roll" - that says it. It's just straight fuckin' rock style, with a little more punk energy in there. We wanted to break right out of the gate with a hard, aggressive, edgy sound.
Life Is A Bullet
Jacoby: This one's about losing your mind, feeling that your head is in the clouds and you're disconnected from the world. But it's also about being ready when you're thrown into life - you'd better be ready to live fast, right now. Sometimes your gut instinct, what you come up with first, is what's right. I wrote the second verse in just one spurt of a thought. It was cool, because I went back and these words fit perfectly right over the vibe of the song. Instead of going, "Okay, let's try it 10 different ways," [producer] Brendan [O'Brien] was like, "That sounds good how it is; you guys don't need to change it."
Time And Time Again
Jacoby: This is, like, "Yeah, I did it, and I'll do it again. I'm an asshole, but you know what? I'm gonna be an asshole again in the future." That's me with my lady. Then the chorus flips to: "Time and time again, you think about yourself before you think about me." That's my lady talkin' to me, so everything flips - the mood of the song, the beat, everything. Dave: I was going for something unusual on this one. When we got into pre-production, as soon as Coby started putting weird stuff over it, I was, like, "I need to jazz it up." What I was doing had become a little bit boring, so I went for some [early] Phil Collins shit. We experimented with a bunch of different beats, but that's the one that felt right.
Walking Thru Barbed Wire
Jacoby: This song is about my dog that died. I came home and he was dead on my bed. It was really shocking. That dog was my total companion. I tell you, man, I flipped. Human beings are our friends, but a dog gives you that unconditional kind of love. In a weird way, it's that same kind of love with my kid. My dog was my family, too.
Decompression Period
Jacoby: This is, like, I've just come off the road and I need time to collect my thoughts. You're going from 100 miles an hour to slammin' on your brakes and sitting still. That's my life. But I live every day just like I want to; I do it my way. Just like Frank Sinatra - me and Frank, O.G. fuckin' rockers. Jerry: When I heard Coby sing the words to "Decompression Period" I started choking up, because he was so putting his heart and soul into it. He's just exposing himself for everything he is. I admire him for that. It's a hard thing to do, but I know it helps him get through some of the things he's got going on.
When we were working with Brendan on "Decompression Period," I was, like, "What am I going to do to achieve this sound in a live situation?" And he said, "Don't worry about that right now. You're just going to make the best record you can make, and you'll figure it out - it'll work itself out." And he was right.
Born With Nothing, Die With Everything
Jacoby: You're born with nothing - you rely totally on somebody else to take care of you, feed you, change your diaper. Then you grow up in a world where people have this instinct to achieve goals and be successful on their own. This is about pushing yourself and living your life as you want to live it while you're here. Also, it's me against the world: "Fed up, tired, sick and twisted/ One-man army, I'm enlisted."
She Loves Me Not
Jacoby: This is about my relationship with my lady, trying to hold that together. It's been twisted and trying in the last few years, and I put my heart on the line about that here. This is the only song on the record where there's a rap, but it's disguised in more of an R&B kind of thing. It was just rhythm and meter and the right timbre and intensity, and it came across really cool.
Singular Indestructible Droid
Jacoby: This is about a conversation that me and my friend Sid Wilson, the DJ from Slipknot, had. It's, like, "Okay, I'm sick of this skin; I'm sick of this body. I want to trade it in. I want to be a different person. I want to move on to the next life." Then the chorus is: "Biological, spiritual, electrical, digital." The biological is the body, and the spiritual is our soul. What the soul is to our body is what the digital is to the electrical - it's the zeroes and ones. If you meld them perfectly together, biological/spiritual and electrical/digital, you'll have this singular indestructible droid. This person gave up his soul to live forever, but to live forever in a physical instead of a spiritual being. The song is also about man's use of the electrical/digital to his advantage or his destruction. It's the clash of the two.
Dave: We asked my uncle [John Olmedo] and his [Indian vocal] group to come into the studio. They sat around the drum, did the chanting and the singing, and we just turned on the mic and recorded them. The next day I was listening to the playback. The song we were working on was "SID." I was listening to the Indian chant, and the tempo totally matched up with "SID." It also felt right thematically: The chant was written by a member of the group. He was having a child, and the song was written to welcome this new life into the world. So when we put it with "SID" - where you hear Coby singing, 'Blood of my blood, skin of my skin' - in this weird way, it matches up with the meaning of this Indian chant.
Black Clouds
Jacoby: That's about confronting your demons. It's one thing to know you have a problem - that's the first thing. The next thing is dealing with it, confronting it and coming to terms with whatever it is. I wrote "Black Clouds" in the darkest, most depressed state I've ever been in in my whole life. In the original lyrics I was talking straight suicide. But I changed that because I came out of it and I was feeling better.
Tobin: We can all connect with what Coby's saying here because he wrote a lot about things all four of us went through in the process of being on tour - traveling, being a band, being brothers. "Black Clouds" started out during Ozzfest. I just sat down at the back of the bus, started the song, and stayed there until I finished the whole thing. All these ideas came about putting strings on it, so when we recorded it, we had an orchestra come in. They played the song, then we cut up what they'd done and put it into really cool parts. We also used 12-string acoustic guitars and this real rhythmic, galloping bass line and drum beat. It was a creative challenge for us, but we got to watch it grow into something and say, "Wow, we've never done anything like this before." It's a different kind of song - it reminds me of a rock opera.
Code Of Energy
Jacoby: This is about me being in a band and wondering what everybody's perspective is on me. There are a lot of things about me people don't know. You might be surprised at how I am as a person, apart from the band. I'm a really nice, loving, generous person - and I'm a fuckin' lunatic asshole at the same time. So with this one I'm letting people know they might be surprised if they knew me, but I'm not letting them all the way in. You can't get all the way inside of me. Dave: This record crosses the sonic spectrum: Some songs have a lot of production, and others, like "Code Of Energy," are really raw.
Lovehatetragedy
Jacoby: Throughout the record, there's this theme of love, hate and tragedy. "lovehatetragedy" says, "Human behavior, peculiar it seems," and if you think about the complexity of the human race - the different cultures, religions, beliefs, desires - it's just crazy. It's something that will perplex me forever. September 11th made me think about life in a different perspective. The song also says, "Tragedy strikes when you least expect it." That's so true, so you might as well live every day as if it's your last. I don't mean live fast, die young, fuck life; it's more, like, this could all be over at any time. Enjoy it and live it and love it while you got it.
INFEST SONGMEANINGS
Infest
Jacoby: "Infest": This song's promising that we will infest. We always start the live shows with it. The chorus is pretty much "We're going to infest/ We're getting in you head." We ask what's wrong with the world today, the government, the media, your family. If you look at the rest of the album, there's a song that has to do with the government, a song about how media affects people and a song about your family. So this one's a opening dialogue; it's meant to open your head up and see what's going on.
Last Resort
Jacoby: It's about contemplating suicide and feeling like you're all alone in your situation. I sing "Nothing's alright/ Nothing is fine." It's written about a guy I lived with. He's still alive, but he attempted suicide and thought that, in a way, he killed the person inside him that was messed up. Now he's a Jehovah's Witness and he's happy. I knew what was going on with him, and I was in the process of moving out, but I was trying to be there for him. When we play this at shows, kids come up to me who clearly connect very closely to it.
Broken Home
Jacoby: This is about divorce and being the kid caught in the middle, feeling it's your fault but finally realizing it isn't. "I know my mother loves me/ But does my father even care?" are some of the lyrics. I realize that in the end, his father did the same thing to him, so it's a repeating pattern. This was hard for me to write. I was working with a vocal coach and he had me sing it. With the band, I'm concentracting on getting it tight, but when I was with the vocal coach, halfway through the first verse, I fell out crying. All that was there were the words, and obviouisly, it still fucks with me. I was six when my parents got divorced. I didn't talk to my dad until two years ago. We've kinda made amends, but something like that doesn't really go away. Lyrically, P-Roach is my counseling.
Dead Cell
Jacoby: "Dead Cell" is about kids who are infected with the "dead cell" virus, people like the Columbine kids who shot up the school: "Born with no soul/ Lack of control." It's about the kids who do these crazy-ass, stupid things. Some kids are just fucked up. I have a center - I know what's right or wrong - but some kids are born "dead cells." Maybe they don't have a good family and they grow up on the Internet or playing video games, all the "shoot 'em up" stuff. But you can't point a finger at one thing; it's a combination of the family, the government, and the media. When I say, "Let me hear the dead cells shout" during a show, I'm mocking the fact that there's a lot of them out there.
Between Angels and Insects
Jacoby: We wrote this in Los Angeles; we were the insects in the City of Angels. We realized that for a lot of people in Hollywood, it's all about money - your possessions and status. Where we're from in Northern California [Vacaville], that matters, but it's not the focus. We're saying in L.A., "The things you own own you." People are doing their daily grind for all these credit card bills. We're asking, if you took away all the money, what really makes you happy? I wrote this to teach myself a lesson. People get caught up in the glitz and glamour and start thinking their shit don't stink. They don't realize that life is about being a good person. I've been reading Tao, and that comes into play in this song.
Legacy
Jacoby: I used to listen to [talk to radio personality] Art Bell a lot. He talks about conspiracy theories and all that crazy stuff. This song is my paranoia about government being corrupt; it's the eye in the sky always watching you. The U.S. government has a thumb on people, and "Legacy" is about transcending that, not really giving a fuck about it. I'm controlled just like everyone else, but in my personal beliefs - what really matters to me - I'm not. The title refers to the legacy of brutality, how government control is always going to happen; it's always going to get handed down.
Blood Brothers
Jacoby: "Blood Brothers" and "Never Enough" were also written in L.A. I'll put a disclaimer on this song: Don't be a weak-minded bitch - just because I say "Kill, kill, kill" doesn't mean you should do that! If anyone thinks this is about The Bloods or The Crips, they're stupid - it's not. The chorus is reflecting on people who don't stay tight, people who turn on each other. As a band, especially, we need to stay tight because there are a lot of people who are out to get you, to take advantage of you and exploit you. I need to stay free from corruption of the music industry. I feel my music is part of my body and that some people involved in it are "the salesmen of my blood." This is a reminder to myself to be a good person because I'm not really a good person all the time.
Revenge
Jacoby: This is a sequel to a song we wrote called "Liquid Diet," which is on Old Friends From Young Years. "Liquid Diet" is about spousal abuse. At the end of the song, I say, "She should pack her bags and leave." In this one, revenge comes into play; it's about the woman beating her husband's ass with a baseball bat and putting him in the hospital. When she says "It's alright, we're in love," she's showing a dual nature: She feels guilt, but there's also a voice in her head - which is the DJ scratch - saying "Don't stop now," like, "Go finish it." So she shoots him, puts him out. Then the music flips and she turns into this Godzilla kind of monster, pillaging and fucked up shit, almost comic book style. At the end, the DJ comes in again and there's a gunshot - the woman kills herself. Having the DJ from [the band] Crazytown drop by while we were recording was fate: He had that "don't stop now" sample, and I knew it was the voice in her head. "Revenge" is totally made up, though I know this crazy shit happens.
Snakes
Jacoby: It's about two-faced people who stab you in the back. I'm saying to them, "Fuck you - I'll turn it around on you." In the situation I experienced, I didn't turn around on them. But in the lyrics, I say, "Do you like how it feels to be stabbed in the back/ And watch the blood spill?" I'm sure everyone has dealt with people like this.
Never Enough
Jacoby: I realized that being happy doesn't make me happy - I need chaos. I ask in the song, "Do I deserve what I got?" and I do ask myself that. I felt like I was running in a circle when I was writing this. "Somebody put me out of my misery" of being happy is what I'm saying, realizing that everything is never enough. For me I need calm and chaos to be happy.
Binge
Jacoby: "Binge" is about being drunk - "All I need is a bottle." I went through a period when I was drinking all day every day. My friends were like, "What's up?" and I was "fuck you" to everyone. I've come back from that, though I still party like a savage. I've been around a lot of people who sniff drugs, and I know a lot of people who have gone down from that shit. I've always avoided it. But I have an addictive personality, so you need to keep yourself in check. The chorus of "Binge" goes, "She say, 'Behave little boy'" - that's my lady putting me in check.
Thrown Away
Jacoby: It's about my little brother and me. We're both ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder] kids. When I get on a rage, I go crazy. "I am a mess/ I've made a huge mess / I can't control myself/ I'm losing it/ I've lost it/ I've spilt my marbles" - those lyrics sum it up. I'll bottle stuff up, and everything that's been bugging me comes out in an explosion. Now, being in this band and playing shows, I just get to go off, let all my energy go. I'm less of a shifty person now because of it; the dopamine gets released. "Thrown Away" refers to throw me away - let's expel this part of me. Yet that side also drives me a lot.
Tightrope
Jacoby: This used to be more of a punk song. Our producer asked us for a song we could do something crazy with. So Tobin just started playing it with a raggae-style bass line and Dave joined in and Jerry dropped some delay and Police-style guitar shifts. Doing this blew our minds because we'd never written anything like it. It's a great song but not typical of us. We might break it out in a headlining set, but it's technically a hidden track.
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