Here is Billy with Monday's song "The Stone:" That song has kicked around in different forms for a while; I finally just got it to a place where I didn't hate it anymore, basically. It started off as a very different thing. I think I had to change the title of that song so Josh didn't think he was still working on the same track. There was always something that bugged me about it; it just wasn't moving forward all the time. There was just something that bugged me, and there is heaviness to music that I think is a delicate thing. You can't just be heavy; if it sounds gratuitously heavy or something then it just irks me. So that song was getting heavy for the wrong reasons and it kind of had to be pulled into shape. I think I finally found a place where I felt comfortable with it after years of dicking around.

And with that song, I had written all of the lyrics, but there were just two lines and the chorus that I was kind of shaky on and Johnette from Concrete Blonde co-wrote some lyrics on this record with me. She wrote on "Too Late" but on "The Stone" there were a few lines in there that she helped me flush out. There was a very different sentiment before, the chorus at first was not something I felt I could pull off, and it was more of a maternal thing. So we went back and rehashed the chorus, and I think we came up with something that fits well, this push-pull of protection, a feeling of wanting to protect your loved ones in a way but not being worthy enough with yourself to be able to accept that same kind of love. A lot of these songs are about pushing people away from you and not loving yourself enough to let others love you.

Check out the video for The Stone right here

Here is Billy with Tuesday's song "Enemies": This is a good old fashion fight song to that that I wrote on my own. It was initially about a good friend of mine that I grew up with when I was a kid and kind of imagining what that guy would be like running into him today. A lot of the stuff he was going through that was pretty tough. A lot of the songs on this record are kind of in groups to me- there are a few groupings you can go with. One of those groups is not feeling worthy, and what happens as a result of that, for a lot of people that are either put down or don�t love themselves enough and therefore lash out, and that feeling of being empowered. You want to be empowered in some kind of way, and if you don�t feel empowered or embraced in some way, there is usually an explosive opposite reaction to that.

Here is Billy with Wedneday's song "Defamed": I've got a couple of nieces that are going into middle school and high school, that kind of age, in the beginning I was thinking about this album, the charge for it, initially, was that time, going into the 7th and 8th grade, you come out of elementary school and coming into a new city of sorts. The school I went to was pretty big, like 600 people in each class. And then you come into this place, like whoa, this is like adults almost. But then there is the clique thing, the popular kid in school to the people kissing the ass of the popular one, and they prop that popular kid up on a pedestal. And then, you're doomed to fail. Or whether it's working with rock stars that I've worked with over the years and seeing people on the peripheral that they expect or want something from them that they can never give. Then they expect people to have that relationship and keep wanting that. You know, it's a destructive path either way, whether its politics to the entertainment business to the catty school mentality that you go through when you're a teenager.

Here is Billy with Thursday's song "Denial Waits": I started writing that song with a different project in mind for a video game a few years back, and I thought about using it for that, but ended up pulling it back for this. I called Paz to come in and help me to write some stuff on this. It was a very different song in the beginning, and then it went away for a minute, I let it sit for a while, and then I came up with a chorus, and it just became a full-fledged different song and a big contender for the record. It was really nice collaborating with her on that, she wrote the initial baseline, the thing right on top of the song. Some of the lyrics, we were sitting down and trying to think, who is this about? What is this about? Again, these were emotionally charged things that were geared towards me. She was helping me flush some of those initial ideas out, so it was really good.

Here is Billy with Friday's song "Forever Can Be": Yeah, musically it was first called �Toy� because I wrote it with my son�s toy guitar in the beginning. It�s funny, as that song got mixed, it was the last song that got mixed, and it was the last song to get done. We had Alan Moulder mixing the record and my due date as Friday, it was our last day of mixing, and I monitored the mix here in LA as he mixed it in London, there was only a second and a half delay, and it was the first time he really did that and it was an interesting process.

Learn more about the album and the band, preview some of the songs, and grab tour dates (they're on Linkin Park's Projekt Revolution tour) - right here!

Preview and Purchase ASHES dIVIDE CDs