“The Hard Way” is about a personal experience that happened a few years ago when I was in high school about a girl getting bullied. I don’t want to give her name away because I don’t want people to look them up and be sending the song to the family, but a girl inspired it. “The Hard Way” is definitely my favorite song off the album. I genuinely like all the lyrics.
We wrote and recorded “The Hard Way” in a few hours. We came up with the bridge and the guitar first. I knew what I wanted to write about before I went into the studio. I knew I wanted to write about this particular experience in this story because I wanted to shed light upon it, and I wanted to try and influence other people to be kinder.
“The Hard Way” ties into Unwanted because I feel like the album has a running theme of not feeling like you’re good enough, and the person who “The Hard Way” is about was made to not feel good enough by multiple people. She ended up taking her own life because of that, so it’s kind of a message to people to be kinder with their words and to be careful with human beings because we’re all delicate at the end of the day.
My Chemical Romance inspired “The Hard Way” musically, too. We took a lot of inspiration from them and the kind of theatrical nature that they always have within their hardcore, emo songs.
I was in LA, in a little studio in the Hills when I wrote it, so I guess maybe that inspired it. I would say the weather, but “The Hard Way” is kind of moody and dark. The song was really inspired by my hometown of Preston.