Lonely Dance

Album: Midnight (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • In this deceptively upbeat single, Set It Off singer Cody Carson deals with his anxiety by withdrawing from his friends and doing a lonely dance in his bedroom. On his Instagram page, he dedicated the song "to our introverts out there."
  • Since their inception as a pop-punk band in 2008, Set It Off have continued to evolve their sound with significantly more pop and electronic elements. For Midnight, their fourth studio album, they wanted to merge their pop and punk sounds after their previous release, the bright pop effort Upside Down, riled fans that preferred an angry frontman.

    Carson told the Songfacts Podcast in 2021: "As an artist, you get conflicted because you're like, 'Well, screw you because I was happy.' I wanted to write about happy stuff. So that's what I was feeling and that's what I did. But then you're like, 'But I also need to think about them and I need to write for them.' So Midnight was me discovering and finding this balance."
  • Carson's bandmates were leery when they first heard this track, worrying it would sound too upbeat for the fans who disliked Upside Down. But he convinced them to give it a shot. "I was like, 'No, trust me,'" he recalled. "If you take a poppier feel or catchy melodies, but you sing about things that are really bothering you, it's still going to connect with them in that way."
  • In the sci-fi music video, directed by Shelby Parks, the band is on board a spaceship and has to fight off an alien invasion. Carson told The Sound Check how the concept came together: "All I had in my head was that we liked these really dark blue lights but I had this idea that I wanted to be very isolated. So I was like 'what if I'm in this plexiglass room, and had bedroom stuff in it. And there's people coming in and out and I keep ignoring them.' And [Parks] took that and just really focused on the word 'isolation.' And what place is more isolated than space! So she had this idea of doing a space thing and then we started talking on the phone, and it was like 'what if I'm in space and I'm not even happy with being that isolated, I wanna be in space by myself.' Then we came up with this concept."

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