Songfacts®:

• As I Lay Dying open their sixth album, Awakened, with this lead single. The song was released for free download on June 25, 2012 and became available online for purchase the following day.
• Lead guitarist, Nick Hipa, told MusicRadar.com how he came up with the song's riff: "Riffs can be very funny things, the way they come about," he said. "There's no real secret. 'Cauterize' was a song that Josh (Gilbert, bass and clean vocals) brought in. He's really good at coming up with riffs. I don't think that he looks at the guitar in a technical sense; he just looks at it in a writing sense. He had a lot of the arrangement worked out. What happens is, we all record individually and e-mail things to one another. So when we get in a rehearsal room, there's a lot of ideas going around."
• Vocalist Tim Lambesis told Artist Direct that Awakened found him penning more personal lyrics than on the band's previous record, and this track "may be the most introspective." He explained: "The first line of the lyrics is 'The truth of my heart is like a repressed a tale.' What's really going on in my mind and heart are things I struggle to grasp. The process of writing the lyrics was very therapeutic. I was realizing things in myself I wanted to change. In other ways, I realized things I've overcome positively. Naturally, that has a certain darkness to it. That's not because I'm a suppressed or dark person. I think it's because if anybody is really honest and they look at the deep issues in their hearts and the things they don't typically talk about, there are going to be dark corners there. The lyrics have a bit of a darker twist to them. We've always been known as a really positive band, but the positivity is addressing those issues head-on and the beauty that can come out of that."