Songfacts®:

• One of the angriest tracks P.O.D. has recorded, this is the last song on the group's 2012 album Murdered Love, which came after a hiatus for the band, whose previous album, When Angels & Serpents Dance, was released in 2008. Lead singer Sonny Sandoval, who wrote the lyrics, said in his Songfacts interview: "It was actually one of the first demos that we had done and got to our management. It's just a heavy song by nature, and it's from me in the whole hiatus period. I've been involved in a lot of charity and outreach type work, and I'm always hanging out with young people and being able to sneak into their lives. You hang around with these teenage kids, and it's a scary place. There are a lot of suicidal kids. Kids that are cutting themselves, they're so confused, whether they've been hurt physically, sexually, or are lost in the cultish religions, there's just so much stuff.
  
  Me being up close and personal with these kids, that's what came out in that song. I'm a man of faith and I'm a follower and a believer of Jesus Christ, and in talking to these kids, and even in talking to people just throughout my career in P.O.D., a lot of these bands and athletes and all these people that you meet, they don't have a problem with Jesus. They have a problem with people that are religious and claim to know Jesus, but aren't living it or acting it and aren't loving the way Jesus did.
  
  In my faith, if I believe that Jesus paid for the sins of the world, and I'm all these things, this is what's going on in the real world, and do you still love someone like me? And even though I know you do, and I believe in you, I believe in your forgiveness and your grace and your mercy, there's still so much confusion around me that everybody's getting in the way and trying to take your place. Everything gets in my way from seeing who Jesus was."
• The song's chorus originally raised a few eyebrows with its insertion of the f-word. The unedited version goes, "They say you are the cursed man, the one who hangs from this tree. I know this is the one and only Son of God but tell me, who the f--- is he?" Whilst the version released to the Christian market omits this song, the mainstream version includes it, but with the f-bomb bleeped out. Sonny Sandoval told us, "It's like, wow, all the things that are said, every single lyric in each verse and the content and self righteous Christians want to focus on the fact that I said the F word. It's absolutely pathetic. And I knew it would happen.
  
  We had that song for almost a year, and I didn't take it lightly. I'd been praying on it for over a year. I'd actually took counsel and let people hear it. And it was 50/50. Some people are like, you know what, go for it. Because my heart is like, I don't write music for Christians. I don't write music for people that I believe are saved and going to heaven. If it's a breath of you and encourages you and gives you a sense of power to go balls out for what you believe in, then by all means. But ultimately we're trying to reach people fed up with religion that are sick and tired of it, and people that are in the real world that really are lost and confused.
  
  Our music has always been a tool to bring hope to those people. I'm sorry we can't please everybody in the church, but ultimately in our faith, I believe you're taken care of. There are a lot of people that live in the real world that are out on the streets, that are prostituting themselves, that are being sexually abused, that are being murdered and killed, and it's an evil world. And sometimes you've got to just give them the truth flat out. And it might offend some people. Might offend a lot of people. But at the end of the day, if they understand it and they get it, and they allow God to speak straight into their soul, then I think it's worth the slap on the hand." (Here's our full Sonny Sandoval interview.)