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Mutiny Within

"Awake"

In our never-ending quest to give you the best music available, we present the Revolver Bootleg series. Throughout each month, we’ll post cool, new, and often-exclusive tracks right here for you to hear before anyone else.

This installment is “Awake,” a song on metalcore group Mutiny Within’s self-titled debut (Roadrunner). Bassist Andrew “A.J.” Jacobs fills us in on the song.

REVOLVER What’s this song about?
ANDREW “A.J.” JACOBS “Awake” is one of the songs that I connect with the most, but Chris [Clancy, vocals] won’t tell me what it’s actually about. [Laughs] Chris doesn’t explain his lyrics much, he prefers to let the listener come up with their own interpretation. This song actually helped me through a rough time recently. I played it over and over again. The reason I enjoy this song so much is because it’s one of the few songs Chris has written in which there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel...“Sorrow breaks me down, it’s crushing me tonight, but I feel alive, somewhere inside”

Which part of it did you come up with first?
Musically, this song came together pretty quickly. I was sitting with my guitar one day, in a really mellow mood, and out came the piano intro notes. Just basically wrote the four chords on guitar and rolled them out, one note at a time. I jammed with that for about two hours, just in a trance. [Laughs] Anyway, I got back to work, slapped some distortion on and started riffing around, and out came the fast intro riff. From there, the rest of the song came very naturally.

Lyrically, again, I don’t know Chris’ specific inspiration. In fact, he was home in England at the time, so communication was minimal. Basically, we sent him the music and he demoed some vocals over it. When he sent it back, we all knew right away that this was going to be a key Mutiny Within song. He really tore that demo up, and honestly, the final version isn’t that much different from the demo. This song seemed to work for everybody right off the bat.

Was this an easy song to write or record?
One of the easier ones. It felt natural when writing and recording it, because this song is pretty much the defining sound for Mutiny Within right now. It’s the first track on the record and it showcases a lot of what we do, a good introduction. Throughout the record, we go through a few different moods and sounds, so that is where things got a little difficult. But “Awake” was no problem.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on this song so far?
The feedback has been incredible. It seems that a lot of our fans are really connecting with “Awake,” and we’ve also gained a bunch of new fans because of the song also. It’s our first single and I think it was a great choice of song to introduce Mutiny Within to the world with.