cutthroat by imagine dragons

I really got into this album by Imagine Dragons, and the song Cutthroad is another amazing song, very unique, raw and original in its own way. It’s violent and aggressive.

Here’s what Dan Reynolds said about the song:

This is a song about the desire I’ve had over the past few years to rid myself of self-pity. I have been given so much and hate the part of me that desires something more or feels sorry for whatever hardship I may have faced at some point. It really is just hatred of certain parts of myself expressed through melody and lyric.

Dan Reynolds, Clash magazine

And he went into more detail with Rolling Stone magazine:

Yeah, that song is really an exorcism of self-loathing. I feel like I’ve spent a lot of years of my life kind of [feeling] “woe is me.” I don’t know if depression is a genetic thing for me or whether it came from religious crisis. I was raised in Mormonism, and it wasn’t really for me. That was hard for me to come to terms with in my brain. But for whatever reason, around my teenage years, I really started to deal with mental illness, seeing a therapist and trying different medications.

That was the focus of all my music, and [there was] a great amount of focus on self. And that song is about kind of exorcising, trying to cut out, that self-pity, and embracing life and all that I’ve been given. A big theme of “Cutthroat” and a lot of the songs on the record is the finality of life. I lost my sister-in-law to cancer last year. I was actually in the room with my brother when she passed. They have seven kids. It was the first time I’d ever actually been in the room with someone who passed away, and that really hit me in in a different way, making me think about every day differently, and how am I spending my time. The year before that, one of my best friends took his life. It just makes you grateful for your health, grateful for each day. People will hear it and think the song is angry at someone else. But it’s really angry at itself.

Dan Reynolds, Rolling Stone

In the same interview (absolutely worth reading), Reynolds goes on to say that it was his producer Rick Rubin who pushed him to really go into the intensity of the emotions he felt, rather than holding back.

I didn’t know what he [Rick Rubin] was going to think, because it’s such a strange-sounding song. When we showed it to him in a demo format, it was still very aggressive. But it also was maybe holding back in some ways. It could have been more manic, I guess. I definitely dealt with a bit of mania throughout my life, and I think I was in a pretty manic space when I wrote that song. And Rick, one of the things he pointed out right from the beginning was, “You need to embrace those parts of the song.” Like, the song sounds like it wants to be manic, but it’s not. And it wants to be angry, but it’s not quite angry enough.

Dan Reynolds, Rolling Stone

I thought it’s interesting that even an established artist like Reynolds needed encouragement to explore these dark emotions and creatively express them in their full intensity, without watering them down. I can see why: he’s got an audience that expects a certain kind of music from him, and this is so different from what you think of when you think Imagine Dragons.

Reynolds also shared a bit of content when the song was released:

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A post shared by Daniel Coulter Reynolds (@danreynolds)

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