Generation Day

This song was inspired by vocalist Sully Erna's realization that his generation will be among the last to enjoy traditional vinyl and CD recordings. He stated on Grammy.com: "'Generation Day' is about realizing that this new era is taking over, and one day our generation day will be shot and be dead. Whether that's completely dead or something that's just an underground market — like there is a small market for vinyl albums now - [remains to be seen], but when I think about that whole world, I feel sad and wish my daughter and the people [who] are younger could have had that experience of putting on an album and pulling out the lyrics and looking at the artwork. It was such an experience back then." "Music is still such a gift, but back then it was more of a whole [ritual] that you did," Erna continued. "You would sit on the couch, put on a new album, lay there and listen to it. Now it's so quick, just hit the app on your iPhone and suck in the new three-minute, preprocessed s--t song. I feel like the integrity sometimes gets lost."

The 6-and-a-half minute epic contains multiple styles within the track. Drummer Shannon Larkin recalled the story of the song to Artist Direct: "Sully had that killer riff. I threw that beat down. The verse happened. We wanted to basically create kind of a loop. I just repeated it. We didn't do anything fancy on those verses. We had the vocal shine. When we were recording that big middle eight, I just kept time on the ride. I was hitting quarter notes on the ride for that whole section until the very end." "Later on, after that song was complete and the drum track was done, Sully and I went in," he continued. "Sully was behind the kit, and I was playing the brass. We overdubbed that middle section. He got to do some big fills on there and swell. It turned out being really different. We'd love to play it live! We basically did what we were doing to the cymbals. Sully and I recorded those drums in the middle section."