Songfacts®:

• This anthemic track finds John Cooper singing of hope in the face of a lost and fractured generation. It is Cooper's personal favorite from the Rise album. He explained to Digital Journal: "I really like this song since it was the very first one that we wrote for the record. It sounds like Skillet and it has a vibe that people expect to hear. This song came the most naturally and it is very dramatic and I like the orchestration of it. In a way, it reminds me of Fleetwood Mac and Meatloaf."
• This won Best Rock Song at the 2014 Gospel Music Association's Dove Awards. Skillet also took home the prize for Best Rock Album for Rise at the same ceremony.
• In a 2014 Songfacts interview, we asked Cooper about the inspiration for the lyric, "The last thing I heard was you whispering goodbye, and then I heard you flatline." He told us: "One of the things that triggered that feeling was talking to a fan about her brother, who had gone into drug rehab. She said he's like a walking zombie: He's alive but he's not really there and he's not the person I knew anymore. He doesn't eat, he doesn't take care of himself, he's going to die sooner or later. And it was one of those kind of moments of, we can still be alive, but not really. Kind of like a zombie.
  
  'Not Gonna Die' is not about drug abuse by any means, but that was the picture I got when I was talking to a fan about her brother."