Daughtry just dropped a new EP called Shock to the System: Part Two, a sequel to last year’s Part One. A standout track on the new EP is The Bottom,” a tune that had been several years in the making.
“We just kind of put it on the back burner,” Chris Daughtry admitted during a conversation with SNSMix. “And when we were working on Part 2, we were just kind of going through song starts and ideas that we had and we’re like ‘Is there anything here? I feel like there’s something.’”
The singer noted “there was something cool in the vibe” to the original song idea, but the vocals needed to be completely scrapped. As he started working on new lyrics with producer Scott Stevens, a concept started to take shape.
“We had had this one song that Scott and I were working on that had this line about climbing my way back from the bottom,” Daughtry recalled. “The song itself just didn’t really feel like it was going anywhere, but we really liked that concept and that line.”
Using that concept as a new starting point, the pieces for “The Bottom” began falling into place.
“Once we had that opening line of the chorus, ‘I was dead and gone lost and forgotten,’ it all just kind of started flowing,” Daughtry recalled. “And then Marti [co-producer Marti Frederiksen] said ‘I was down in a hole.’ We were talking about Alice in Chains that day for some reason – as we do every day in the studio – and it was an interesting little nod to ‘Down in a Hole,’ to climb my way back up from the bottom.”
The phrase “I was down in a hole / ‘Til I climbed my way back from the bottom” became the centerpoint of the chorus. The Alice in Chains inspiration marked a breakthrough for “The Bottom,” helping the tune finally come to fruition more than 4 years after Daughtry had his initial song idea.
“It was like, ‘NOW we have a chorus. NOW we feel like we’re getting somewhere.”
Listen to ‘The Bottom’