It's a person we have all met. Someone we trust, whose intentions we know and with whom we feel comfortable sharing our time. "Dancing with the dead" is about the disbelief one feels when this person's true intentions turn out to inflict suffering rather than pleasure, break trust rather than build it, and repel rather than attract. This disbelief may be perplexing enough to lead one to conclude this person is dead on the inside. Like a zombie on the dance floor!

This concept fuelled the lyrics we wrote for this song and ignited its edgy instrumentation and vocal layering. The original guitar tone was very distortion saturated and more akin to a metal sound. We spent hours sprucing up the guitar with variations of effects but could not capture anything compelling. Just before giving up on the entire idea, we decided to start cropping sections of the guitar audio clips. It sounded ridiculous dry, but with the channel effects turned on it instantly became the intro to the song.

We also layered 3 non unison vocal lines using 3 distinct voices to create the chorus. As an initial idea we expected this would sound cluttered and confuse the ear of the listener as to a focal point. However, after our first take we loved the outcome and found it very suiting for the track. We actually created a makeshift vocal recording area in the corner of my bedroom. It was a bit comical initially, as the sensitive condenser microphone captured every background sound, including passing cars, aircraft, running faucets, etc. It took a bit of creativity and numerous takes to finally capture a clean recording (we covered the windows with pillows and more or less held our breath while the other person was being recorded to ensure we did not shift our weight which would cause the bed and chair we were sitting on to creak).

Every other aspect of the song simply fell into place after this point. It felt very natural, more akin to something we allowed to freely channel through us rather than something we intentionally created.