Divided By Friday’s new EP, Prove It, is officially out via Hopeless Records. Jose from the band was kind enough to write up a Track-By-Track guide for PropertyOfZack to give fans a look behind the song meanings on Prove It. Read up and check out the EP!

1. Prove It-
With this song we really wanted to just set up the feel of the whole EP. We wanted to get the underlying message of all the songs out on Front Street. Pretty much the entire EP is about following your dreams and finding yourself. We went through a lot of changes in the past year, with leaving school and signing to Hopeless, and from that transition we kind of had to really assess what our priorities were and what was important to us. This song is really just about the fact that we’re four young dudes who’ve been playing music for a long time and have been given the chance to live our dreams. It’s us saying, “We’ve worked hard to get to where we are and we aren’t going to stop until we prove to ourselves and everyone around us that we have what it takes. We’re willing to sacrifice whatever we have to, in order to make our dreams come true.”

2. Growing Up-
This song is about the struggle of self-identity and self worth that I went through, and that I think a lot of people go through, once I started making my way into the realm of “adulthood.” When you’re young you always have these huge dreams of being something special and doing something that not many people are able to do, but once you start getting older, it’s almost as if you just willingly let go of that desire to be something more. We come from a really small town where people choose to stay in a certain domain of practicality and tend to avoid deviation from the typical lifestyles that they’ve grown up around. Basically, you go to college and later start a career, or you graduate from high school and start working at a factory, immediately after.  So, as you can imagine, we got a lot of strange looks and mixed reviews when people found out that we wanted to pursue music, full time. So, I basically just wrote this song about breaking that cycle and straying away from the status quo, despite how others might feel about it. It’s about being your self no matter what. A lot of people tend to think that growing up means letting go of the fantastical and settling for the mundane. I guess you could say that this song just advocates the idea of individuality and encourages the listener not to conform to the people around them, just to fit in.

3. The Dark Passenger-
Well, firstly, this song was inspired by the show, “Dexter.” I am a huge fan of the show and have spent countless hours watching it over the past couple of years. As any fan of the show knows, once you begin watching, you really get to know Dexter as a person. Although he’s a serial killer with this huge secret that he has to keep from his family and friends, in a lot of ways, I found that some of the struggles that he goes through are very relatable. He often feels like he can’t relate to anyone; like he’s completely alone. He can never really connect with anyone and often times, this causes him to feel almost like less of a human than others. I know that when we’re on the road and away from our families, a lot times I can start feeling really disconnected from other people. On the long car rides from state to state, you really spend a lot of time inside your own head, just thinking about any and everything. It’s a strange lifestyle where, when you’re on the road for more than a month, you want to go home and when you’re home for more than a month, you want to get back on the road. I think that sense of confusion is a similarity I saw between Dexter and myself. Also, just the idea of having a “darkness” inside of you is a concept that I think a lot of people relate to, but just tend to not talk about. Of course, his darkness is a lot more extreme than the average person’s, but I think we all have those days when we kind just feel bummed and want to be left alone.

4. Lost in Limbo-
This song was inspired by one of my favorite movies, Inception. There are so many different aspects and facets to that plot, but the side of the story that really stuck with me was Dom Cobb’s conflict with the projection of his wife, Mal. He loved her so much and had so much guilt, for something that was beyond his control, that it consumed his life. I felt like the main conflict between the two was that Mal’s projection didn’t want Dom to forget about her. That idea really stuck with me because I feel like we’ve all felt that way before. We’ve all been afraid of being forgotten or becoming irrelevant, so I decided to write this song from her perspective. Watch the movie and the song will make more sense, haha.

5. Face to Face-
Face to face is a very personal song, for me. I wrote it about a relationship, or lack there of, that I had with a girl from high school. It was one of those cliché situations where I had feelings for her, but we were friends and I was too afraid to complicate the situation. There were a lot of other, equally as lame, excuses as to why I never pursued a relationship with her, but ultimately, I ended up never telling her that I ever had feelings for her. I felt pretty miserable for a while, but a year or so after graduating I met an amazing girl who I guess you could say, “fixed” me. Once I met her, it was like I had never had feelings for anyone else. Any sense of unfulfillment just dissolved. Well, a few months into our relationship, I was up late one night, thinking about how lucky I was to have this girl in my life. I also started thinking about that girl from high school and how I never told her how I felt about her. While I no longer had any romantic feelings for her, I still felt ashamed for how much of a coward I was, for never telling her. So, I decided to write a song that would just lay it all out there. In it, I would tell her that I used to have feelings for her, but that I’ve met someone new now, fallen in love with her, and that would be the end of it. So, that’s what I did, haha. I think the song does a good job of telling the story from start to where I am now.
 
6. Closer-
When I wrote the lyrics for Closer, I was trying to write a song that would be very hopeful and optimistic. With the title track, “Prove It,” I focused on how hard we’ve worked to get signed and to get to where we are now, where as with “Closer,” I’m more so saying, well we’re here now and we still have a long way to go, but we feel just as passionate about what we’re doing right now, as we did the day we started. I kind of envisioned myself laying in the van one night after a crappy show in the middle of nowhere and for some reason still being excited. There are always low points on tour, and just in life in general, so I wanted this song to portray that silent sense of calm that you get when you know that, despite whatever you’re dealing with at the moment, everything will be ok. Also, with “Prove It,” I felt like the message is obviously coming from these young, energetic, kids who are out to show the world that they aren’t going to let anything stop them. It’s fast paced and written almost with a sense of entitlement that say’s, “Hey, we’ve given everything we have for this, so we deserve to be taken seriously.” But with “Closer” I wanted to show that we’re still the same energetic kids who have big dreams and goals, but that we’ve been given a dose of reality. We’ve been on crappy tours, we’ve played to empty venues, we’ve gone hungry, we’ve slept in the van next to cemeteries, we’ve showered in truck stops and we still feel just as strongly about playing music as we did from the start. I think it really brings all the songs together in a way that says, you’re going to have bad days, things are going to get rough but any dream worth having is worth working for.