Songfacts®:

• !Mayday! is a Miami-based hip-hop group comprising vocalists Bernie Garcia (aka BernBiz) and Wrekonize, keyboard player Aaron Eckhart (aka Plex Luthor), bass guitarist Diego Cardenas (aka Primo) and DJ/percussionist Gio. The band's first single and music video "Groundhog Day", featuring Gnarls Barkley's Cee-Lo Green, received over 2 million views on YouTube within a day of being added. !Mayday! gained more prominence after featuring in two music videos for rap superstar Lil Wayne. Both clips, "Da Da Da" and "Get a Life," were filmed on the roof of a building in the middle of the day.
• This single is taken from !Mayday!'s album Stuck on an Island. The band told AntiMusic about the tune.
  
  Plex Luthor: "'I'll Be Gone' started with the vocoder part... I was just messing around with the vocoder and some Jack Daniel's and ended up with that simple rhythm part that made me want to add to it... the rest of the intro just fell in line after that, the piano riff was freestyle one take. The verse part just came from a need to juxtapose musical ideas or moods I guess, it's more relaxed and sparse than the intro until it builds back up to the chorus so the energy of the song has a storyline. That's pretty much it, sorry I can't be deeper, it's hard to describe these feelings or musical motivations in words. These things just come out how they do, sometimes your hands have a mind of their own and they create without instruction.
  
  BernBiz: "What's memorable about 'I'll be Gone' for me was the fact its one of the few tracks we actually all kind of worked on together...at the same time! Since usually our process is layered with time in between each addition to the song, it was cool to get to the studio and hear an almost finished version of the beat already playing. The vibe was sick in the lab and Me and Wreko got to work pretty quickly. The whole time I heard it, I imagined something dramatic for the chorus. I knew what I wanted to say before I actually knew how to say it. I blurted out versions of the hook "you'll miss me" etc. etc. Till finally threw some form primitive yelling and sentence building we finally get the chorus line "by the time you hear this...I'll be gone". I hopped in the booth to reference it and what I did is actually what you hear in the final hook version.
  
  Wrekonize: "When we started writing the lyrics for 'I'll Be Gone' I told Bernz that I wanted to do a hook that was limited to one phrase. We had been writing very big melodic pop hooks and I wanted to switch our approach. I didn't know what I wanted to say yet, but I knew I wanted it to be a short phrase and let the beat breathe after that. Once Bernz started into that train of thought about 'not appreciating things until they are missing' we started toying with ways to approach that. I don't remember now how we got there, but once we came upon the exact words it clicked. We both knew we couldn't leave it at that so we started layering the choir part with a melody I had in my head that the beat really wrote for me. What I dig most about this track is the intro. When I first heard the way Plex had the intro I knew right away that I did not want to intrude upon it with lyrics. I felt right away that the intro of the whole song needed to remain as it was and stand alone. I'm a sucker for the dramatics. Either way, it ended up being a great intro for an album."