*** CLICK ON EACH SONG TITLE TO SEE INDIVIDUAL SONG LYRIC PAGES ***

*** LYRIC & ART VIDEO: youtu.be/Xyeh_Y3_cfU ***

This is the most personal album I’ve ever made. Besides a handful of songs not intended for public release, this is the first time I’ve been the lyricist and vocalist for any project. It was a necessary and cathartic experience to go through the process of writing and singing/screaming the lyrics. And my lyrics came out quite blunt, with minimal poetic masking, so you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about and how I'm feeling. Most (hopefully all) of you will relate to these feelings. More than any other music I’ve ever made, I HAD to make this album. I needed to work through, express, process, and feel all of the intense thoughts about the world now, to not be suffocated by how overwhelming it all is.

The process of creating this music was also an important and unique experience. I wanted to continue what I started with my self-titled Intensus album (2011, Metal Blade Records), and use improvisation as a compositional tool. But I chose not to stay just within the aesthetics of extreme metal. I had tried that already and had not been satisfied with the results. I had recently revisited and released my early solo electronic music under the moniker Wolf Kraft (my middle names), and also created an experimental remix album of old extreme metal computer compositions. So I decided to land somewhere in the middle of the two projects, both stylistically, and process-wise, and also bring in some other influences that I hadn’t previously explored. I would also utilize the tools of the recording studio as an instrument itself. Whereas Intensus was one unedited drum set take, start to finish, this time I set no rules for myself. There was no kind of editing that I wouldn’t allow myself to do.

The initial concept for how to start building each song was to choose a tempo, and then improvise a drum track along to the click track. But instead of a full drum set take, I would do one piece at a time. For example, floor tom first, then ride cymbal, then hi-hat, then snare and high tom together. And the drum tracks would be heavily processed with effects like bit crusher, lo-fi filters, distortion, and reverb. This gave the percussion parts the impression of electronic music, due to the layering and aesthetics, but with a natural, human feel from the live improvisation. This, along with acoustic and electric guitars, drum machine loops, some natural drum set sounds, various synth, piano, and symphonic keyboard sounds, natural and auto-tuned vocals, make it an acoustic-electronic hybrid.

The most exciting part of this, for me, was that I had no idea what a song would end up sounding like when I first started recording it. And once I got started on the beginning, I would still have no idea where I would end up. I often surprised myself. In keeping with the spirit of spontaneity, most of the music and vocals were recorded as soon as they were conceived. Whatever came to me in the moment that seemed like the right musical idea, I kept as is, or was the core idea that I then fine-tuned soon after. For example, a lot of the synth bass lines, which were often the first thing to be recorded after the initial percussion tracks, were improvised in one take. Then I went in and edited the MIDI data to add extra notes and adjust rhythms.

The first song, “Stay,” is me finding my way, musically and lyrically. The verses speak about the experience many people across this country had during the 2016 election; intense arguments and fallouts with family and friends. I happen to live largely in a liberal bubble, so it wasn’t a personal experience, but I know it was something many people had to go through. The final stanza, during a very different musical section, is me facing my own feelings about it all. I started making this album in June of 2018, so a lot of really horrible things had been building up and weighing on me for a while. “My soul can’t take anymore. Must try to feel it, then move forward.” A common therapeutic tool when dealing with negative emotions is to allow oneself to sit with those feelings for a period of time, and then set them aside and work to move forward. This set my path for the rest of the album.

“Leave This Land” is me kind of spilling it all out and venting about everything wrong with this country. This was the most cathartic song on the album for me to write and record. When I was listening back to rough mixes, I felt the emotions starting to get pulled out of me. Then, when I was done with the final mix and listened to it by myself in the car, I bawled my eyes out, feeling every ounce of emotion in the lyrics. I felt a lot better after that.

I knew I wanted each subsequent song to focus on one particular thing that’s wrong with our country and/or the world. The final lyric in track 2, “Foes of Mother Earth, leave this land,” gave me an easy jumping off point for the next song, “Rising Tides.” Of all the horrible things going on right now, climate change is by far the most concerning and frightening, because the survival of human civilization is at stake. Younger generations can grown up to create a more progressive, accepting world, and laws can change. But if the world food supply diminishes and large groups of people are being displaced by rising sea levels, wildfires, and temperatures that make many parts of the world more and more uninhabitable, what good is any other progress?

I had been compiling a list of musical ideas for a while at that point; various approaches that would serve as jumping off points. For the main percussion layer in “Rising Tides,” I programmed a syncopated synth bass line (that I knew would probably change later), and then improvised jazz fusion-y beats on bass, snare and hi-hat along with it at an easy 90 bpm. I tightened the snare and recorded a second snare track, intending to pan the two snares hard left and right. Then I time-warped the track double speed, to 180 bpm, and started writing the song.

I hadn’t thought ahead to what the subject of the fourth song would be, but when the horrific news about Catholic priests in Pennsylvania broke, the decision wasn’t hard. Musically, “Unholy,” began with another idea I had written down: Improvise a 16 bar syncopated rhythm, transcribe it, and then record a guitar track playing that same rhythm.

For the final track, once again, the news guided me to my next topic. The Kavanaugh hearings were happening, and I was feeling particularly disgusted by the words and actions of way too many men in the world. Though all the lyrics were initially written with this subject in mind, the chorus and final section of the song really apply to every piece of the entire album’s message. “Centuries of patriarchy have made this mess…” and “It’s up to me and you to make a difference. Pull through, don’t let fear behind us.” This ended up being an appropriate concluding statement.

Thank you for listening. And if you actually read this far, an extra thank you for being interested enough to do so.