Alternative metal band Egypt Central formed on October 2, 2002 in their hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, borrowing their name from one of the toughest roads running through the city. After eight shows they caught the attention of former Lava Records CEO Jason Flom, who offered the band a record deal. Their self-titled debut album was recorded with producer Josh Abraham in Los Angeles. This Alice in Wonderland referencing song is the title track and lead single from their second record.
Egypt Central explained the track to Noisecreep: "The song 'White Rabbit' is all the bottled-up angst of years of a bad relationship finally spilling out. This person had burrowed their way into lives and was trying to eat us from the inside out. We wouldn't let it happen and triumphantly moved on from that relationship. The song is a reflection of that journey but has grown to be so much more."
The band added that they also view the song as a rallying cry of sorts, saying, "The 'White Rabbit' serves as a metaphor for anyone or anything trying to get in the way of our dreams. We won't be pushed aside. We will be heard."
Bass guitarist Joey Chicago told the story of the song in an interview with AntiMusic: "I remember flying down the highway at 90 miles an hour and first thinking of the white rabbit lyrics. We were driving fast being fueled by a punk style, upbeat, instrumental demo we had recently recorded. We were headed from Memphis, Tennessee to McGehee, a small town deep into the Arkansas landscape. A small cabin, used mostly for hunting dear, was open to be used during the off season months. It was pushed deliberately back into the woods and surrounded by thick trees and large farm lands. It was the perfect place to escape all distraction and begin crafting our new record. We had struggled so badly over the last few years, fighting personal and business trials, and had been so anxious, desperate really, to get a chance to write some new music. One of the main focuses of the new music was going to be honesty and transparency, something we felt was lacking from everyone around us. We started discussing metaphors for the business as we had experienced it, ideas of how to show just how strong deception can be when you want so badly to believe it is true. At first we compared it to hell, being pushed into the fire and coming to a point where you no longer feared the pain of the blaze. We had faced almost every negative turn of events a band could and somehow had come out standing, we were not afraid of anything and weren't going anywhere. We wanted to get that point across.
We lived out at the cabin for a couple months, drinking, writing and blowing things up in the campfire. All a part of the creative process. We had about 50 song ideas and pieces as we headed back to civilization. One of our favorites being our harder fast paced song about the gates of hell. In it, the first verse lyric read 'Your magic, white rabbit, has left its writing on the wall, we follow, like Alice, and just keep diving down the hole.' A perfect description of the way we had been feeling. The deception continued and once again deeper down the hole we went. We had gone and recorded 14 songs and a month after finishing what we thought was a completed sophomore record, we had business tragedy strike again. We lost the ability to use any of the songs we had just recorded. All that work gone forever into the hands of circumstance and misunderstanding. We were devastated but determined. We rebuilt and started again.
Months later we drove down to meet Skidd Mills in Nashville for a song writing session. The first of our writing sessions scheduled for the second, second record. We played a lot of our new ideas for Skidd, one of them being the song including the white rabbit lyrics. That verse had been tossed aside in the last recordings and was still very much a useable and unrecorded lyric. Skidd loved it, and so did we. The song White Rabbit started to take form. The original purpose of the song had rooted itself so far into all of us at that point, by the end of the first couple nights the structure of the song was there. We wanted the song to have a diminished kind of creepy, haunting, warning like feel to it and really incorporated that idea into the riffs and scale selections. When it was complete, we loved it so much, we chose to record the whole record with Skidd. The chemistry was obvious and it really stood as an anthem and real jumping off point for the band on the brink of a new horizon."
