Stricken

Stricken means being wounded by an action of someone or something. In this song, the album's second single, lead singer David Draiman is hurt by something a woman did to him. When he says, "I'm crippled by all that you've done, into the abyss will I run," it means that he can't forgive himself for what was happened, as if it was his fault for his misfortune.

Draiman already explained the need to guard his heart on "Guarded," the album's previous single. Once love wriggles its way in on this track, it feels like a painful affliction. He explained the song is "about those moments when someone comes into your life and it's almost as if you've been afflicted with a disease you can't get rid of - devastating and debilitating."

This is one of the first Disturbed songs to include a guitar solo, a feature the band's guitarist, Dan Donegan, grew out of the songwriting process for the album. "When we started writing, we went back to the basics of just kind of jamming out riffs," he told The Flint Journal. "That brought us back to some of our influences. It made the songs seem like some of them could use guitar solos. We just thought we would expand on that. We're trying to contribute in our way bringing this element back to music." Donegan also explained that grunge bands probably influenced the lack of solos in their previous work as well as in rock music in general. "Ever since the grunge days and this 'alternative' thing, there hasn't been a whole lot of soloing going on," he said. "When we first formed, we had a lot of guitar solos in all the songs. As we were developing, our songwriting - for me, personally - was starting to become more influenced by like Soundgarden, Alice In Chains. Soundgarden, especially, really didn't have any solos."