Songfacts®:

• Hail To The King was produced by Mike Elizondo. The Los Angeles producer and songwriter is best known for his Hip-Hop collaborations with artists such as Eminem and 50 Cent. He previously worked with Avenged Sevenfold on their 2010 album Nightmare. Guitarist Synyster Gates told MusicRadar.com it was Elizondo who suggested this track. "He was hearing a kind of low vocal, swagger-based rock song," he explained, "sort of a quintessential '80s or '90s vibe but with a very modern approach. It's a bad freight train that never stops."
• The song is about the band going to their favorite bar (Johnny's Saloon in Huntingdon Beach, Orange County, California) and getting themselves in trouble. Vocalist M. Shadows explained to Kerrang! magazine: "It's about the prison in your mind - the prison of going there to drink away your problems. Everybody's in the same mind-set there and everybody's doing their time. For us, it was a metaphor about being trapped in your own head and using devices to even that out and make it better."
  
  "We went to Johnny's a lot during the making of this record," he continued." It's a place where we wrote (2003's) Waking The Fallen and (2005's) City Of Evil too. Every night when we'd finished writing, we'd go and have a drink. We kind of got away from that with the white album (their self-titled 2007 record) and (2010's) Nightmare. It's one of those places that's like a family there, so we tried to get back to that a little bit on the record."