Well I had the idea for "Afflicted" bouncing around in my head for a few weeks, it's a song that deals with experiences I had in past relationships, so I just drew from that and one day at home in my office/music studio I picked up my acoustic and started some chord progressions and almost immediately I developed the chorus with the lyrics and melody, I have a tendency to have full chorus ideas in my head before I even attempt to record the idea. I hammered out the basic arrangement and recorded a demo of vocals and just the acoustic - didn't have the verse lyrics completed at that time - the guys make fun of me sometimes because I record demo's where I just ramble and put in words to work a melody I have for the song....So I did just that and played it for Matt and we basically fine tuned the arrangement.

Matt and I are the main song writers in the band. We work really well together and share the same vision musically for the band. Usually I write full songs or even partial songs and play them for Matt and we finely tune them and the same goes for Matt. Sometimes he'll just have a riff idea (and Matt is great with writing killer riffs) - like in "Cure for You" Matt wrote the main riff and we built the songs around a chorus I had kicking around. Typically when we write a song we'll completely demo it in my studio at home before playing it for the other guys in the band, once we have the basic song down Jamie will drop in some really cool guitar flavour and leads. This is just how we work and it seems to work well. In fact, we¹re always writing and have new material in the demoing process. When we were in the studio I wanted to keep the acoustic element in "Afflicted". I am a fan of that sound and have always been it adds a sense of warmth to it. I also felt it was important to retain the original feel of how I wrote the song which was on acoustic. In the bridge of the song I wanted to go back to the intro feel and focus on just vocals and the acoustic, because it brings the song back down to a softer feel before the chorus hit's you hard.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album - here

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