This is a somewhat darker track, both in terms of the themes but also the overall tonality. I had a period where I was experiencing some pretty big challenges and this translated into writing a lot of music which starts out very dark and brooding, but I’ve always tried to find a way to turn things around and end on a more uplifting, positive note. You know how everyone goes on about how Every Breath You Take is so dark and clever because the music never changes and the narrator remains trapped in his obsession? Well, this is the opposite of that.
I think I must have been listening to Ommadawn a lot when I wrote this; more in terms of the use of vibrato and ornamentation than the composition. The writing process was very quick; I improvised the melody in one-and-a-half takes and after that the arrangement also came together quite naturally. It’s nice when a piece of music decides on how it’s going to sound without me having to think about it too hard.
This one really goes places. I tried splitting the different sections out into their own songs but none of them worked out. I think there’s a reasonable flow from one section to another, so it doesn’t seem too odd unless you directly compare the final section with the introduction. As you can imagine from the title and the atmosphere of the introduction this started out inspired by “Leviathan” but then it diverges pretty wildly and the QOTSA-with-double-kick drums aren’t like anything Mastodon would ever do.
This is a song that I wrote while I was trying to write another song, which itself turned into two separate songs. Sometimes compositions take a lot of effort to fit together, and sometimes they seem to just come out naturally. You’ll often hear from (actual, professional) songwriters that they feel like a particular piece of music already exists out there, independently, and all they are doing is condensing it into a listenable form. The really frustrating part for me is that the music which comes easiest usually ends up being better than the pieces I’ve really sweated over.
This is more of an improvised sketch, really, but sometimes a piece of music doesn’t really need anything more added. Gear-wise this is my JEM with the Sustainiac running through Archetype Plini. I might also have used an EBow on some of the backing instruments; it’s inferior to the Sustainiac in nearly every conceivable way with the exception that, since it works on only one string, you can sometimes get a bit more control over exactly which note is sustained.
This is a remaster of an older tune; the main difference is that I re-did the bass part and “re-amped” the guitars (i.e. swapped the original Native Instruments Guitar Rig plugins out for Neural DSP equivalents). The verse is heavily inspired by Eric Johnson’s track “Trademark”, while the chorus sounds a lot more like Mike Oldfield to me and the final guitar solo heads distinctly in the direction of Dave Gilmour.
The idea was to have two lead guitar melodies in conversation with each other. If anything, though, my favourite part of this track is the backing, which comes across as nicely claustrophobic.
This piece starts out both subdued and tense. I had the option to keep it that way, constantly circling back on itself, but I don’t really like music that makes a thing out of never resolving and frankly I felt like a bit of catharsis.
I tend to get more productive when I’m feeling frustrated. Music’s a great way of taking negative emotions and sublimating them into something more positive.
I like instrumentals that have lyrics (I’m pretty certain that “Liberty” by Steve Vai is an example, and that’s a killer tune). The human voice is much more engaging to listen to than pretty much instrument, and phrasing a melody as if it’s sung helps a lot with making it more memorable. Having a lot of extra harmony parts in the background also helps.
This is the companion piece to “Ardor“; the two are intended to be the first and last tracks of an EP, although I haven’t quite worked out which songs best fit in between. Despite being, by my standards, unusually dense and orchestrated, this was surprisingly easy to mix.
This tune is about that time at the end of a good day when you’re dropping off to sleep, feeling generally well disposed and thinking about how lucky you are to have the people you love. This is a reprise of another song; I wrote two quite different arrangements to the main melody and they branched off into their own separate things.
