Where the songs came from pt. 1

I figure I might as well shed some light on the creative process and where my songs come from. Usually when people ask me I just say something stupid like "I take a bottle of colt 45 and go from there." That is a bullshit answer that I use either to hide behind when I feel like I wrote a song that was too simple or when I don't feel like explaining all the emotion behind the music. I don't write lyrics often because for me the story is the music itself. So here we go...

"Judgment Day"
This song was actually written during a sound check for a show we played when I was in high school. There was this really pretentious "prog rock" band warming up and Mark, Mike and I decided we should mess with them, so I offered up a riff that I had been messing around with and we jammed on it unplugged in the lunch room at Fordham Prep. Then we took the stage and blew them away. We should have played it at the show, but we didn't. Allen wrote lyrics for it and called them "Black Hearts and Tyranny" That was all well and good, but way to Emo and it didn't feel right, we were playing this like ominous song and the lyrics were about a break up or something. So when the band and Allen split for a while we called it Judgment Day to get as far away from that old idea. Tim wrote the lyrics as they are now and everything has worked out pretty well since.

"The Steel"
This song has actually been around since about 2003 or so. Around then I was really into Manowar. So I wanted to write basically a tribute to "Warriors of the World". The steel was my horrible attempt at that. The original song was like 100 bpm with a galloping bass, a straight 1,2 beat drum track and a really really boring guitar. However it was the first time that I wrote solos. They were really really bad. When Mark came into his own as a drummer we went back to "The Steel" and reworked it a little. At first he did the running cymbal throughout the song, but we got rid of that, used it only during the verses and in the choruses (to give mark a break) we put a breakdown sort of double bass line that is really fun to play on the bass as well.


"Sleeping Awake"
In high school I was really into writing these tributes to my favorite songs. My family took a trip across country, and in a hotel room in New Mexico I saw for the first time Jerry Cantrell's video for "Anger Rising". I wanted to harness the anger and power of that main riff. So when we got back I sat down with my guitar and jammed out this riff that was pretty close. Then I added these other parts which to me sounded pretty good. It was the first time I had come up with a drum part that used quintuplets. It was awesome (or at least I thought so). I even wrote lyrics. They were about not being able to sleep and because of that the protagonist of the song was speaking to demons and seeing things that were destroying the world... So when my computer died I didn't have backups of the shitty lyrics, which is probably for the best. So I sent it off to Tim for lyrics. Tim's very into politics and such so he came up with this apocalyptic song that works. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED... I love that line. It captures the essence of the song.


That's enough for today. I'll let it all soak in... Coming up next... Seeing in the Darkness, Fratricide, and Angel of Fire.

- Eric