Code of the Road

Album: Never Too Loud (2008)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the opening track and lead single of the band's fourth album Never Too Loud. It was produced by Grammy award winning record producer Nick Raskulinecz, known for his work with Foo Fighters, Velvet Revolver, and Evanescence.
  • The Seattle Punk band Zeke was a big influence on this track. In our 2013 interview with lead singer and guitarist Danko Jones, he said: "I'm a huge fan of Zeke, and Zeke is known for writing these über ultra fast fast Punk Rock songs, done in ten seconds flat. But when they slow down, they can give Motörhead a run for their money, when Motörhead slows down. I think Motörhead are the heaviest band in the world. Same with Zeke. Same riffage, but slowed down a bit, which is other bands' versions of being real fast. So I wanted to write that kind of mid tempo Motörhead/Zeke kind of song. So that's what that main riff is, just the chugging part."

    He added: "It was a pretty easy song to write. There was really nothing except the pre-chorus that took a while to get together. I think we fixed the song in the studio because the pre-chorus wasn't happening. That was about it. Other than that, it pretty much wrote itself. Lyrically it's about touring."
  • In a 2009 interview with Music Vice, Jones defined the "code of the road" as "playing hard, delivering the goods every night... all that sex and drugs stuff happens, but we're just happy to be playing. When we wrote the record we'd just come off of tour and a lot of the songs reflect that time of constant touring."

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