Mute Failure

I created five sequences each with their own track mutes. I put them in song mode. The mutes work perfectly. I exported the song into a sequence.
It begins with everything muted, none of the track mutes seemed to carry over correctly. Why?

Should I have done the muting on the complete song sequence not the individuals?

The workaround is to export the individual sequences, cause I can’t see my self redoing all those mutes.

I keep one sequence as my main, and play that first to prime all the tracks, then I record the song mode