Songfacts®:

• We Are the Fallen are a band comprising of original Evanescence members Ben Moody (guitar), John LeCompt (guitar) and Rocky Gray (drums) along with American Idol Season 7 finalist, Carly Smithson (vocals). They are rounded out by bassist Marty O'Brien, whose recording and touring credits include Disturbed, Kelly Clarkson and Tommy Lee. Their name alludes to Evanescence's 2003 major-label debut album, Fallen. The band were officially unveiled during a press conference on June 22, 2009 in Hollywood, California. They performed there a two-song set consisting of this song, which is their first single, and a rendition of Evanescence's "Going Under."
• Smithson, who had been working on a solo project and is friends with Moody's housemate, Monique Morrison, explained to CNN how she hooked up with the band: "He had never watched American Idol and he didn't know who I was. I am good friends with his roommate who recently moved in and I had met him briefly. My friend came and saw me live and then planted the seed in his head. She said, 'You should really consider my friend for this band,' and he said 'Who is your friend?' She said, 'You know, the girl you met down the basement,' and an artist he has been working with played him a bunch of YouTube clips of me.
  We were hanging out at about one in the morning and he called my friend and said, 'I just watched your friend. I should have done this a long time ago. Where is she, when can I meet her, I need to meet her right away.' She said, 'Well, actually we are out right now and we're going to be at the house in about 20 minutes.' We came back to the house and we had a meeting which lasted until about 4 a.m. Obviously it was a decision I needed to make very fast because they were looking for a singer and people don't wait forever. I called my manager and it was a done deal pretty much the next day."
• This song was penned by Carly Smithson, who then altered it after watching the 2009 horror movie Drag Me to Hell. She told Artist Direct the story of the song: "I'd started the song in Atlanta and when I met the boys that was the icebreaker that started the whole record. It was the first song we did together. We saw Drag Me to Hell one night and, at the end of the movie, the girl falls into a grave. It's raining, and she's trying to get out. We were like, 'That's really cool!' I'd left California and gone back to Atlanta where it's quite Southern. I'd been in the entertainment industry for so long and I had so many people that I watched success and fame ruin. They were so pure and lovely, and they fell to the earth. I'd watched the industry consume them and them consume themselves. It's like that line, 'I watched you let yourself die.' You let the awesome person you are just waste away and now you're just that networker or social butterfly. It's basically that 'You stabbed me in the back to get ahead' kind of lyric. After seeing Drag Me to Hell, I changed the lyric to 'Bury Me Alive' at the beginning. It means the same thing, but it's a little bit more visual."
• The song's music video was helmed by director Kyle Newman and his wife, actress Jaime King. It uses a funeral and burial as a metaphor for a relationship ending as a result of disillusionment. Smithson recalled to Artist Direct: "When we got the treatment in, we'd never met Kyle or Jaime before, but they just had this vision that was mirroring what we were feeling when we were putting together the song. It was honestly perfect. We all agreed on it unanimously. It was like they'd been in our brains. They hit the nail on the head with everything down to a 'T.' The video complimented the song perfectly with the stained glass—even to be somewhere that was so creepy, because it was a graveyard and a mausoleum, it was so beautiful that you forgot where you were. It had such beautiful marble in the flooring, and everything about it was so stunning."