Loser

This is a song, explains 3DD frontman Brad Arnold, about one of his buddies from when he was a teenager. "He was from a good family, but he just kind of got mixed up in cocaine and stuff." Arnold says that the point of the song is not him calling his friend a loser; in fact, he says, despite the title, he's actually not. Rather, the song is about his friend's self doubt, and how he internalized his feelings. "Thankfully," says Arnold, "he's doing a lot better now. And I get a lot of people saying they can really identify with that song in some way. I think everybody feels like that every now and then."

Brad takes a moment to go through the first few lines of the song: "The idea that it's like breathing right away and all that, it's really in the chorus, just really talking about the physical act of doing it, and how the physical act makes you feel. And I could identify with it, because I've done it (cocaine) a couple of times when I was a teenager, and I just never did it like he did it. And I wouldn't ever do it again. And so I knew how it made me feel, and that was always one of those things with me that I could feel that monkey pulling, and I was like, Uh-uh. And a lot of people just couldn't. But the verse is really about the physical act of taking the drug, and the choruses are basically kind of looking for the outcome of the inevitability of sooner or later it's gonna kill you."

As much as Brad loves people digging for meaning in his songs, he never gets frustrated when he hears an interpretation that differs from his original intent. Unless the interpretation if offered by his young nephew. He tells this story: "My nephew, when he was about 3 or 4, and we were on tour for the Better Life record, his words to this song were, 'you're pushing me off of lobster legs.' And for the next 6 months, every time I played that song, I was standing there trying not to sing, 'You're pushing me off the lobster legs.' That's more the frustrating interpretation that I'm talking about," he laughs. (Check out our full interview with Brad Arnold)