Die By The Drop

Album: Sea of Cowards (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Die By The Drop" was the first single from the second Dead Weather album, Sea of Cowards. The band is one of Jack White's many projects; he was also in The White Stripes and The Raconteurs at the time. White didn't write this song - the three other band members, including frontwoman Alison Mosshart did - but he produced the album and released it on his Third Man label. It was also recorded at his Third Man Studios in Nashville.
  • The song's music video was directed by Italian/Canadian photographer and director Floria Sigismondi, who previously helmed the White Stripes' Blue Orchid clip. She also directed the 2010 Kristen Stewart Runaways movie.
  • Vocalist Alison Mosshart told About.com about writing the lyrics for Sea of Cowards: "With Dead Weather, we start playing and I can hear what it sounds like in four seconds. That's been really exciting for me: to work that fast, to write that fast, to just make stuff up really fast. Instead of sitting around, buried in my journals and books thinking about lyrics, it's just: 'I need lyrics right now, so I better open my mouth and sing something.'"
  • Jack White explained the name of the album to The Sun May 7, 2010: "The album title refers to the way the internet allows people to spit venom and knock people in a cowardly way using fake names. It seems to me that people aren't teaching this generation anything about responsibility. The internet allows people to make a statement that the whole world can read and listen to-but they're too much of a coward to leave their actual name."
  • Mosshart told Artist Direct that the masks on the album cover were the idea of Floria Sigismondi. She explained: "The title of the record is Sea of Cowards, so the masks tied into being a coward and hiding behind some other imagery. We did that video and it had all kinds of voodoo-ey looking stuff like that. We really obsessed with this Captain Beefheart photo. It's a really old black and white picture of the band. They've got weird spaceman heads on. Their masks don't go together. You can't see any of their faces, and they're wearing these homemade costume things on their heads [Laughs]. We had that photo kicking around so we sent it to Floria when we originally started talking about doing the video. That's what came about. The front cover is just two Polaroids that she took when we were standing around in those things. We just stuck the pictures together. It was two of us on each side."

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