Songfacts®:

• Chris Carrabba (from Rolling Stone magazine): "It's absolutely about war. More specifically, it's about a soldier coming home from war, trying to adjust. The narrative is a conversation from son to father and father to son. It's a loosely fictitious tale, based on 2 friends of mine and a third person, whose story I saw on 60 Minutes - the soldier was wearing a Dashboard shirt. I wrote Slow Decay about the horrors of war that we, as a nation, seem to be turning a deaf ear and blind eye to. Many Vietnam vets are still maladjusted because they weren't reintegrated into society, so this will be a hot-button issue for the next 20 years. It's not the typical anti=war song, but I think it's a necessary one."