Songfacts®:

• This is the title track from the third studio album from American alternative metal band Stone Sour. Vocalist Corey Taylor founded the band in 1992, five years before he joined heavy metal outfit Slipknot, together with former drummer Joel Ekman. The set up for Audio Secrecy was Taylor, guitarists James Root and Josh Rand, bassist Shawn Economaki and drummer Roy Mayorga. The album was recorded and produced by the band and producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains, Deftones) at Blackbird Studios in Nashville during the destructive storms and devastating floods that hit the historic heart of Music City.
• Taylor told Kerrang! about this instrumental: "I had an idea for an intro, which I wanted to be dark, melodic and then build into the first song. I wanted it to build tension. I wanted it to build tension. I wanted it to feel as though you were climbing a hill to reach the summit."
• Corey Taylor explained the album title to Spin magazine: "I love when a phrase has a few different meanings, and I was trying to find play on words for 'idiosyncrasy.' Idiosyncrasies are those little things that differentiate us, that make us individuals. But at the same time they tie us together. I hit on 'audio secrecy' and immediately realized that it can mean something completely different to people. It can mean something dark or practical, light or funny. After thinking about it for a while, I realized it's a descriptive way of talking about music. Consider classic songs like 'Master of Puppets' by Metallica or 'These Arms of Mine' by Otis Redding. They're drastically different songs, yet both epic songs. Why do they sound the way they do? Why do people gravitate towards them? To me it's about the undertones or the overtones, the details—the way it was recorded, the temperature in the room, the instruments they used, the performance, the mixing and the mastering. It all comes down to these little elements. That, to me, is audio secrecy. That's what makes one song killer and one song filler. What makes one song live forever and the other one delegated to a bargain bin."
• Audio Secrecy is the first Stone Sour album not to have a Parental Advisory Sticker. Slipknot's third Album, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses was also their first not to have a Parental Advisory Sticker.
• Taylor told Spin magazine about Audio Secrecy's cover art. "We wanted to play with the idea of a secret society, like Skull and Bones or Illuminati, and tie in little clues or secret folds on the cover so it becomes something different all together. The way we looked at it was, 'What if this is the last album to ever get released by a band? What would you want to do with it?' Because in this era of zip drives and memory sticks, there's no guarantee you'll be able to release another physical album. We really wanted to make a statement with it. I can remember waiting in line to buy Iron Maiden and Metallica tapes and I would study the liner notes. I would read the names of the people they thanked or the little anecdotes and just wonder what they were thinking when they added that. I want to keep that going. I refuse to think that the record industry is dead because I've signed enough copies of my albums to know that people still buy them."