Youth of the Nation

This song was inspired by the March 5, 2001 shootings at Santana High School in Santee, California, where 15-year-old Charles Williams walked into school with his father's gun and fired 30 shots, killing two students and wounding 13 others. The shooting was remarkably close to where P.O.D. was working that day, and inspired this song. In our interview with lead singer Sonny Sandoval, he said: "When we were actually writing the record for Satellite, we were two blocks away from the Santee high school shootings. We had taken a break and went out for some coffee, and we see all the fire trucks and the police department and the helicopters and news. And we're like, something's going on. We turn on the TV and all of a sudden there's a young kid who has trapped everybody inside the school and he's shooting. Here we are, glued to the TV and we're literally two blocks away. All this is going down, and here we were supposed to write music. It kind of just set the tone for how we felt that day."

On April 20, 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado killed 13 people in a shooting spree at the school. P.O.D. stands for "Payable On Death," but that's a reflection of their Christian beliefs, and not a call for violence. The band spends a lot of time working with young people and trying to represent them in their music. Sonny Sandoval told us: "We had always been a touring band and we had toured through Colorado, even when Columbine had happened, and we had an awesome underground following, even of kids in Colorado. So when we toured through Colorado, some of the kids that survived the Columbine shootings put on a fund raiser, so we've always been kind of involved in that. We're hanging out with young kids, we're talking with kids, and that was one of the things that was going on when we were touring so many years ago. So it had always been something that was on our shoulders. And then when this happened it was like wow, what's going on with these kids? And it was like here it is, these are the youth of the nation. So it just sparked that whole story."

Guitarist Marcos Curiel said of this song: "It's always been a topic on tour. I don't want to say it inspired us, but it gave us the motivation to write something. Well, when we were writing this record, we wanted to be secluded so we went to Santee, in East San Diego, where we had this 35x35 rehearsal studio. One day we were on our way to practice, and we saw all these cops, but we didn't know what was going on. Later we found out what had happened (The shooting). It was an emotional situation. The main control room in the studio has a TV, and we're watching the news on there, thinking, 'Man, this is a mess.' I'm the only one that doesn't have kids, but everybody was like, ' Dude, that could have been my kids in there,' or 'That could have been my sister.'"