After breaking through last year with “Carry You Home,” Alex Warren has another hit with “Burning Down” — and he says he wants it to give you that, well, “stabby” feeling.
The song is lyrically and sonically different from the other material on his album, You'll Be Alright, Kid (Chapter 1), and he tells ABC Audio that it's because of what inspired it. "I think I just wrote how I felt. I was going for something different as well," he says, noting that he wanted it to sound "eerie."
"You hear a song and it's like, 'Hey, the song's about, you know, losing a friendship and getting stabbed in the back.' And I wanted it to sound like that," he notes. "You know, like, when you hear a spooky song, you think of Halloween — that type of vibe."
In fact, Alex wanted the sound of the song to evoke what it's about — in the most literal way possible.
"I really wanted it to feel like you were getting stabbed in the back," he says. "And if you had no lyrics, it still told a story that you could understand. And I didn't really care how different it would sound from my record, because I think if I was able to tell the story right, it wouldn't matter. And I think we did really well on that."
But the point of the song really hit home when Alex released a version with Joe Jonas last year, and the official video showed them both dying over and over again, in various gruesome ways.
Alex will start his Cheaper Than Therapy Global Tour on Feb. 27 in Belgium; it gets to the U.S. on April 24.