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"'Rome' is left-over political angst from 'BYOB', with the latter dealing with Bush fucking us over with a vengeance with the Iraq "war", and the former running on how the 9/11 attacks were responded to. It's mind-boggling, both how much shit we were fed afterwards, and how we learned absolutely nothing from the whole thing as a people. Instead of learning that it's time to join the rest of the world and stop being so fucking arrogant, we took the opportunity to shit all over the memory of the people that died and transform ourselves into an even more obvious target.
I wrote everything minus the coda on my acoustic in my apartment in Somerville, making it one of three songs to come out of that period in my life. The time change from the verses to the chorus serve as a way to emphasize the foreshadowing of the heaviness that's about to come, because the song really wouldn't make any sense from a metal standpoint without the riff after the last chorus, and especially the coda. The scale run that leads into the last riff before the coda is an ad lib I always throw in during the instrumental middle eight in silverchair's 'Emotion Sickness', and just seemed really appropriate to set off the aggression in the riff immediately following. The coda riff is something that's been kicking around for a while now. Back in the Mantra days when Justin had just barely gotten his double bass pedal, we used to do our best impression of Slipknot and do stupid joke songs about toasters and whatnot, and by accident I ended up coming up with this one really heavy riff that was actually worth keeping, and it finally found a home in 'Rome'. This is going to be a great song to play live, it was pretty much written for that experience and nothing else, as any good rock song is."
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