Born to Lose

Album: Dead Throne (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the first single from the Dayton, Ohio metal core band The Devil Wears Prada's fourth full-length album, Dead Throne. The record follows a loose theme of anti-idolatry. The Devil Wears Prada mainman Mike Hrancia explained to Artist Direct: "It's a theme that I've always written about. We always put it in our songs, and it's like we're saying, 'We're not your heroes. We're not meant to be put up on this pedestal. We're not meant to be looked up to' or anything like that. A lot of Dead Throne is based upon that including 'Born to Lose.' Some songs have a different take on that theme than others do. 'Born to Lose' is a very bitter outlook, and it's bitter towards those at fault. As a lyric writer, I'm sort of putting myself down. A lot of the record has self-hateful lyrics, and 'Born to Lose' has some of that. It works from that perspective as well."
  • Guitarist Chris Rubey told Alternative Press why the band chose this for Dead Throne's first single: "It's got a good groove, but it's not too different; it was a safe song for us to put out first. We didn't want to alienate any of our fans that like the sound that we have already. [But] it pushed what we've been doing a little bit already, and it lets people know what the new album is going to sound like as best as you can from one song."
  • Producer Adam Dutkiewicz removed some of the breakdowns from the original recording of the song. Guitarist Chris Rubey told Alternative Press: "A lot of what he took out of Dead Throne was where we would change tempos for a specific breakdown and then we'd have to do some weird tempo change back up. A lot of bands will just do that and not think twice about it. There's such a thing as good songwriting that flows, and we try to adhere to those basic guidelines. Adam made sure of that. There's a part in the middle of the song where all the guitars cut out, and it's basically a breakdown with no guitar. The only reason that even happened was because before the song was even recorded, he muted the guitars there and was like, 'This keyboard part is so cool that I don't even want the guitars to be here.' There's no way we would've written a breakdown with no guitars, but working with Adam in that scenario, that's how a lot of the parts that are considered creative came about on the album."

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