Dear Cocaine

Album: We All Bleed (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is a track from We All Bleed, the third studio album by South Carolina alternative rock band Crossfade. The record was the band's first since signing with Eleven Seven Music and was released on June 21, 2011. Talking about being dropped by Columbia Records after their 2006 album Falling Away and the making of this album, lead singer Ed Sloan told us: "It took us three years to write the record, so we didn't have any timeline, we didn't have a label breathing down our backs. So we could take our time with the record and we took our sweet time. We took three years to write a record instead of six months, like most bands have to. So that plus the ability to actually once again live in a hellhole in your own mind for a year, and then be able to look back and write upon it, and then come out and be successful again."
  • Vocalist-guitarist Ed Sloan explained to Noisecreep that the band felt passionate about the song's subject matter. "We've been a touring band for many years now and we've seen a lot of things within that world," he explained. "Now I'm not saying that cocaine is exclusively used by musicians and people in our industry, but we've found through our travels that it's a huge problem within our community. That drug can do so much damage and we've seen people we know and love go through that struggle."
  • The tune came about after guitarist/keyboardist Les Hall came around with a piece of paper that read "Dear cocaine, I'm not your b----." This gave him the idea to write a song where cocaine was treated as if it's a person and said "screw you for messing up our friends' lives." Sloan told Noisecreep: "We could have easily just called the song 'Dear Heroin' or some other drug, but for us we've had more people we know destroyed by coke than anything else. I guess you can say it was like some kind of dialogue between me and the drug and it felt really good to tell it to f--- off."

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