Songfacts®:

• The Bad Ends is an Athens (Georgia, not Greece) supergroup formed by Mike Mantione of Five Eight and Bill Berry, former drummer of R.E.M. The two musicians have known each other for years and Five Eight even opened several shows for R.E.M.
  
  The project was birthed one day in 2017 when Mantione crossed paths with Berry by chance while walking down the street. The pair made small talk, hit it off, and decided to start a band together.
  
  They worked on songs for their debut album, The Power and the Glory, at Mantione's home in Atlanta after recruiting a few more local musicians. Mantione's wife Kelly suggested bassist Dave Domizi and guitarist Christian Lopez join them; keyboard player Geoff Melkonian was added as well.
• Choosing the group's name was a straightforward process. "I knew I wanted it to be the 'Bad something,' because of what a lot of the songs were about," Mantione told Flagpole. "They settled on The Bad Ends because it could take on a number of meanings - a bad ending, or bad times coming to an end."
• Released on January 20, 2023, The Power And The Glory captures the lively and energetic spirit of Athens during its heyday, when the B52s and R.E.M. brought lots of musical energy to the city. It combines this with introspective reflections on music, the passage of time, the dynamics of friendship, and the inevitability of mortality. Mantione told Uncut magazine the album is "depressed dad rock. It's music as a human consolation for having to die."
• Leading up to The Power and the Glory, The Bad Ends performed a hometown show on November 27, 2022, and released "All Your Friends Are Dying" as a single. The song recounts a local Big Star tribute organized in the wake of their frontman Alex Chilton's death in 2010, with Mantione noticing all the people who weren't there. "There were some pretty big holes on stage," he told Uncut. "And more than anything else I wanted to hear them filled."
  
  "Lyrically the common thread on this record is death and dealing with it," Berry added. "Would I have wanted to produce a record like that 40 years ago? Absolutely not. But at my current age, the concept of death occurs to me with greater frequency than when I was in my 20s. Many of my friends have died. Mike just wrote about it so beautifully."
• The five band members wrote "All Your Friends Are Dying" with Mike Rizzi, a touring/session drummer who was a member of Five Eight between 1999 and mid-2007.
• The Power and the Glory is the first album Berry worked on since recording for the Tourette Syndrome Charity album Welcome Companions in 2000.