It was the summer of 2012 in Long Beach, CA where I had been working with a manager at the time, Ron Magee, who believed in my talent and was helping me find a singer. I had many ideas, but needed a comrade to complete the quintessential rock duo I envisioned. Enter Rob Sandoval. We had an immediate connection and the ideas began pouring out. Rob, manager Ron and I collaborated in the lyric department as we listened to the riffs I had for this song. "Pain in Love and War" was the first song we wrote together and it meant so much to us that it had a hand in not only defining our sound, but our band name as well.

As I played the heavy staccato verse riff, both Rob and I worked on a melody that gave us both a feeling of being overwhelmed and out came "Drowning in my own trust you tore away from me." As we searched for what that meant to us, Rob immediately jumped to a past love relationship gone awry whereas I felt a connection to an estranged friend I used to idolize when I was on a path of addiction. The story began writing itself, from the bitter taste that remains from hurtful words to seeing the truth, that it "never meant so much" to the significant other.

When we got to the Pre-Chorus, with its pauses and openness, we both felt a sense of being drained by the verse's outpouring and we wrote "I'm tired of trying, I've tried and tried, too tired to try again." The chorus has a bit of swagger to it, so we juxtaposed a pleading "Can't take no more" with a vindictive "What goes around comes around" which seemed to sum up the turmoil that can have you feeling left out in the cold.

The second verse deals with the sickness that brews from being caught up in a world of someone else's pain. One can easily become a slave, addicted to co-dependent "twisted games." The solo section is our depiction of the second verse's last line, "You're breaking all of me, I'm tired of this insanity," which sums up the rollercoaster ride that unhealthy relationships and addictions embody. From the highs to lows, they always end up in chaos and back to drowning�