Dance With Death, the first single from our new record and the song that starts the new record. It's very fitting in that regard because the theme of this song sums up SFD's basic mantra... There is no obstacle, not even the metaphor of death that will stand in the way of achieving our goals.

What's funny is that I actually wrote this song as a piano ballad a few years back. Then, while bouncing around in the back of the van touring our debut, I started thinking of material for the new record. I began humming the melody from the ballad and the words Dance With Death immediately came out. That seems to happen a lot, once I have the right melody, the words just seem to be there. Instantly I knew what this song would be about and it wasn't going to be a ballad anymore.

I remember sitting in the studio with the guys a few months later telling them about "Dance". After showing the guys the basic chords, we took a stab at playing it. You see, we write very old school, sitting in our rehearsal room, facing each other and hashing out the songs as a band where everyone's opinion matters. Immediately we looked at each other and just knew we had something special. Lats, our bassist, expanded on the song by adding some brilliant riffage. Actually due to Mikey Doling and Dave Fortman's great ideas, Lat's riffage ended up becoming the intro and bridge to the song.

That in itself is a funny story and great preproduction lesson. The way this record worked was we sent live demo's of our new material to Dave and Mikey for notes. Then, they flew to So Cal and we sat in our rehearsal room going over the material. Once it came time to go over "Dance", we jammed the song with its original structure. The first words out of Fortman's mouth were "Well, that song is good to go, no changes here". Not even 2 seconds later he goes... "But� what if we tried this�" haha. Boom, we did a little riifage switch on the intro and the bridge, Mikey Doling added the intro vocal hook and the song ended up 10 times better than it already was. Lesson learned� always be open to ideas, the worst that can happen is they don't work. In this case, we had a really good song that became great and our first single!