Jekyll And Hyde

Album: Got Your Six (2015)
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Songfacts®:

  • FFDP guitarist Zoltan Bathory told Revolver magazine the story behind the song: "That one has a funny story," he said. "Ivan [Moody, vocals] doesn't sleep at night, so it's pretty often that he'll call one of us at four or five in the morning and leave crazy messages on our phones. And what happened was, Jason [Hook, guitar] was going through his voicemail and found dozens and dozens of these messages from Ivan. So he copied them onto a hard drive and then we pulled out different words and sentences and put them together. And that's the verses of the song. They're taken directly from Jason's phone. It's one of my favorite songs on the record, just because it's so bizarre."
  • The song title comes from the name used for a person displaying two completely different characters, one respectable, the other not. The phrase is derived from the eponymous character in Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, who switched between good and evil in his own nature.

    Stevenson based his story on William Brodie, a respected businessman and Edinburgh town councillor by day and a leader of a gang of robbers by night.
  • Ivan Moody told the story of the song to Metal Hammer magazine: "What happened was that it was, like, 4 a.m. and I was up writing, and I looked on the Internet and saw that somebody had posted on my Facebook page - but I don't even have a Facebook page," he explained. "So that was the start of it. "

    "At the very bottom, there was a media release saying that I had died - that I had overdosed in some club in New York," Moody continued. "This rhythm popped into my head - this quick 4/4 beat - and I knew that Zoltan [Bathory] would be sleeping and Jeremy [Spencer, FFDP drummer] hates when I call him late. So I left it on Jason's voicemail, and it was the beginning of 'Jekyll And Hyde'. It ended up being a fantastic f--king song. I think it's one of the best we've ever written."
  • The song's music video features the band members doing various nonsensical things. It was created by Five Finger Death Punch themselves, without consulting their record label, Prospect Park. Zoltan Bathory explained, "Punking the label and trolling the trolls is actually very satisfying … so either we make a video that makes a difference like 'The Wrong Side of Heaven' did or we just f--k it all up and have fun with it... just clown the whole thing as we did with 'Under and Over It'… and now with this one. We didn't even hire a director … we didn't want this to accidentally make sense…"

    Prospect Park president Jeremy Summers added, "First we were scratching our collective heads but we never once interfered with their vision… so ultimately - if that's what the band wants to put out we are not going to stop them. We were shocked, then cried, then laughed because it's actually funny."
  • Ivan Moody explained the song's meaning: "Everybody is Jekyll and Hyde," he said. "There are multiple personalities to every human being, and no matter how civilized and sophisticated you think you are, if you dare to look at yourself very, very closely, you'll see… somewhere deep down… there is a demon inside. Your circumstances may not have provoked it yet but trust me, it's there."

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