Transforming despair into hope

While I think "Faraway Island" will go down as this project's biggest technical hurdle for various reasons, the honour of being the biggest emotional hurdle goes to the other extended piece: a suite combining elements of "March for the Age", the "Escapes" and "After the Party", closing the album, which I have decided to title simply "Escapade".  (I can already imagine feeling the need to reassure the other musicians that this is not a Janet Jackson cover.)  Given the emotionally charged nature of this track, as well as it being the most drastic musical re-working by far, I have decided to prepare the score in advance alongside working on the other stuff, so that when we "officially" get to this one I can concentrate solely on lyrics.

All three of its component parts are, in isolation, among the musically darkest material in the set.  Moreover, as things stand the long C-sharp major chord (with instrumental noodling on top) that ends "My Last Escape", and consequently both Escapade and Escapade 2, feels to me like a tacked-on happy ending, even though I'm also convinced it is the right ending for the album.  Therefore, the task at hand is to contextualize this ending by fusing three songs of despair into one song of hope.

This is where it's going.

On top of this, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in due course, I really wanted to keep the piece's length under 8 minutes.  (That would be 160 4/4 bars at this song's tempo.)  Amazingly, this seemed to happen organically, without me having to cut or rush anything - the total length of the score is 155 bars.  This literally felt like a miracle.

The piece basically falls into 4 main sections:

1. "March for the Age" - bars 1-27
2. "My Next Escape" - bars 28-75
3. "After the Party" - bars 76-102
4. "My Last Escape" - bars 103-155

I've included the original titles in this breakdown solely for reference.  What strikes me immediately here is that the "Escapes" ultimately provide basically two-thirds of the music!  Well, I did say I was going to work in "salvageable elements" of the other two songs, after all.

The "March for the Age" section consists largely of the strings/flute "B" section of the original.  This is not so much a new idea as a return to form: in the sketch this is ultimately based on, this served as intro and verses, paired with what would become the "Escapes" chorus.  As a transition to the "My Next Escape" section we have the only contribution from the harmonically static "A" sections of the march.  I felt this to be necessary because it does have a melodic connection to that ending.

It's been Yamaha-strings.  It's been Jupiter-theremin.  This time it's going to be clean electric guitar, an octave lower of course.

I decided to make it more interesting by adding a bass guitar countermelody based on the longer variant of the "Escapes" post-chorus.

The "My Next Escape" section is largely unaltered from the original, up to and including the guitar solo verse.  It's worth mentioning that in the second verse of the Escapade 2 version, I remember absent-mindedly pushing the button to record some harmony vocals despite not having a plan, and surprising myself by improvising a really inspired part!  I like the result so much that I've transcribed it for the new version, even with no lyrics as yet.

I didn't want to overexpose the "Escapes" chorus before the piece is coming in to land.  Therefore, rather than leading into the second chorus, the guitar solo instead leads directly into the "After the Party" section.  This is not a full statement of what is, after all, my least favourite song on either Escapade.  Instead it's basically just enough of a nod to "After the Party" to open up new possibilities for the next and final section of the piece.  I have of course completely re-written the piano part to (hopefully) not be such a flagrant "The Great Gig in the Sky" wannabe this time!

It's a harmonic what-if scenario inspired by "The Great Gig in the Sky".  That does not mean it should actually sound like that Pink Floyd classic!

A quiet string arrangement based on the "After the Party" coda serves as the calm before the storm of the "My Last Escape" section.  As on both Escapades, this will be heralded by a theatrical piano/drums re-statement of the "Escapes" riff.  However, I feel that both extant versions of "My Last Escape" fail to realize the dramatic promise here.  So this time, I've combined it with the tritone progression of the "After the Party" introduction, and added what I hope will be the most intense distorted guitar moment on the whole of Chronicles.  It leads naturally into a guitar transcription of one of the "After the Party" flute solos, but with "Escapes" arrangement - it's wholly fortuitous that the chord changes of these songs overlap so much, but it's most welcome.

Only then do we get a second "Escapes" chorus.  But it's not quite the same!  The detail of one chord being changed in this restatement, doesn't seem so random in this version: the altered chord happens to be a tritone away from the key chord, so the interpolation of "After the Party" material contextualizes it.  This is followed not by just a cursory nod to "March for the Age", but instead a whole "verse" using a written solo adapted from the original pre-divergence sketch.  That sketch is probably from February 2006, by the way, making it the oldest material on the whole album.

And then, at last, we have the final chorus (only the 3rd statement, compared to effectively 4 in previous versions) and the blissful C-sharp major finish.

To me, this feels like a new composition that happens to consist entirely of old material.  I already cannot imagine a more fitting conclusion to Chronicles of a Dead End.

A song of ice and fire

When George R. R. Martin chose that as the name of his famous series of fantasy novels (which I've never read), I don't think he meant it literally.  But with some fiery electric guitar work in place alongside the various machine-like elements, that's exactly what "Them" is well on the way to becoming.

It proved to be a difficult part.  That couldn't be helped, as the song's heavy classical influence means that in the various written lead parts, every note is important.  I did, however, opt to have an improvised solo near the end, instead of yet another restatement of the basic melody.  The song's climax, meanwhile, proved so explosive that I think it will be worth the awkwardness of having Lynsey do the wild "Wooooooo!" from the corresponding moment in the Escapade version to crown it.

It's honestly a little freaky how similar my guide sounds to the original.

In the Escapade 2 version, this moment is far more restrained and has me mimicking (surprisingly decently) the gentler falsetto "ooooo" near the end of the Beatles' "Get Back".  I guess that could be a "plan B" of sorts if I ultimately decide this is just too ridiculous.

Poetry Corner IV

No, there's no III.  After some deliberation, I decided to have the Roman numerals in these post titles always correspond to the track numbers.

Once it became clear to me that "Them" was going to need Lynsey on vocals, it soon followed that I needed, at the very least, to change the perspective.  At first, I envisioned this as someone in a relationship not wanting to make single people feel inferior - perhaps inspired by the idea of an imploring "Paradise by the Dashboard Light"-like vocal treatment.  This, however, struck me as a risky approach because unless it was done just right, I'd come off as clueless at best.  So instead, I chose to broaden the song's perspective yet further, turning it into a more general protest against status symbols of all kinds.

Interestingly, this still allowed me to re-use most of the original second verse, and some of the third verse I added for the Escapade 2 version (in the Escapade version the third verse is, yet again, the same as the first).  Only the first verse was completely re-written, drastically re-contextualizing the rest.

Look around, up and down,
You'll see people so sad beyond measure,
Those who never had your little treasure.
Don't you want to throw away your crown?

Don't just say you understand,
When I can see you've never known their pain.
They'll be lying out in the pouring rain,
Doesn't matter where you stand.

Are they there just for your style?
They are on this ride, just like you and me.
Do you want to show what they might never be,
Or do you want to see them smile?

One thing I'm still undecided on is whether I should leave the song title as simply "Them", or add a subtitle in brackets before or after it.  And if the latter, what should it be?

Undeleted talkback

As things stand, the in-progress mix of "Them" ends with a barely-audible me saying the word "excellent".  This was, of course, me reacting to the drum take I'm using.  Normally, I would have already cut that off, but because the song will ultimately end in a fade-out, such editing is fairly pointless until all the instruments in that passage are mixed in.  That won't be the case until the 5-string bass guitar is recorded.

Mixing this drum performance wasn't so easy.  I didn't want the drums too prominent for most of the song, largely because of its length and bass-heavy nature, but the two taiko-style passages are another matter entirely, especially since the first of these opens the song with drums literally on their own.  I used a combination of two strategies to make this work.  Firstly, for those passages I faded up two extra ambient microphones that I normally don't use, giving a bit of extra resonance to the "main" drum track there.  Second, and more importantly, I superimposed two alternate takes of the passages, placing one at each end of the stereo picture, and added a large amount of reverb to these "extra" drums.  The effect is as thunderous as the intro to a song with 5-string bass needs to be!

"I have a bad feeling about this"

Even though "Them" is hands-down my favourite track on Escapade, I approach it this time with some trepidation.  Its original lyrical subject matter (jealousy and paranoia in the face of perceived romantic competition) is, to put it lightly, a touchy subject nowadays.  Thankfully, at least, the original lyrics are (as usual) extremely cryptic so they don't bother me as much as they potentially could.

Keeping them intact is, however, out of the question for a somewhat esoteric musical reason.  The Escapade and Escapade 2 versions of this song both take advantage of a synthesized bass's ability to go much lower than an actual bass guitar can.

Carole King said it best: "I feel the earth move".

Obviously, this calls for a 5-string bass guitar, but even those only go down as far as B0 in standard tuning.  Transposing the song up 1 semitone would theoretically work, but would also put the song into the fiendishly difficult-to-read key of G-sharp minor (that's 5 sharps).  So I've opted to transpose it up 2 semitones, into A minor... which puts the vocal part a bit beyond my comfortable range.

Lynsey to the rescue!

Which, in turn, means that a radically different lyrical approach is called for.  Truth told, I'm still undecided between several different angles I could take.  However, while I don't know what the vocalist should be singing, I do know how I want the vocals to sound.  I arrived at this by a circuitous route.  Some time before planning Chronicles of a Dead End, I cooked meatloaf (the food, that is) for the first time in my life.

Not my most hated of all loaves, it turns out.

As you might expect, the conversation at the family dinner table soon turned to Meat Loaf (the musician), who had then recently passed away.  And that conversation, of all things, got me interested in listening to his work for the first time, ever.  Ironically, what jumped out at me the most had nothing to do with Meat Loaf at all: namely, Ellen Foley's gloriously heated co-lead vocal in "Paradise by the Dashboard Light".

Anyway, I soon realized that Foley's part was exactly how "Them" should have sounded all along.  As an aside, I find it amusing that Foley's singing technique runs circles around Meat Loaf's notorious lack thereof, while at the same time being at least his equal (if not his superior) in sheer dramatic force.

Not that I'm suggesting that "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" would be a good lyrical model for this.  It wouldn't.  It's just a point of departure, really.

That aside, a big part of why I like "Them" so much is because it's the one time that the goofy, and at the same time somewhat eerie, video-game-music-like quality imparted by Escapade's production is not completely out of place.  In the interest of preserving something of that, I've opted to program more of the keyboards than usual on the Chronicles version; exceptions are the organ throughout and one quiet synthesizer solo in the middle.

As a composition, I actually think it's pretty far from Escapade's strongest offering.  In particular, I was never quite satisfied with the way the song started with a "Won't Get Fooled Again"-like long power chord amid noisy drums, but (back then) wasn't really sure how the song should begin.  This time, though, I had to think of something different, because "Days to Midnight" (which is the album opener this time) already starts with a similar gesture, and I don't want to repeat myself too much.

What I ultimately decided on was to cannibalize the drum intro of another song I'd written around the same time, but never released.  The passage has a flavour of the primal power of Japanese taiko drumming, I think.  I considered bringing in an actual taiko artist, but without knowing what kind of notation (if any) they'd be familiar with, that would be difficult.

While I was at it, I abridged the "development" section quite a bit.  It's an interesting idea, but I'll freely admit that the extent to which I stretched it out for the Escapade version was filler.  As a result, the Chronicles of a Dead End version of "Them" is going to be about a minute shorter than previous versions, even with (like "Days to Midnight") the tempo slowed down a notch.

End of side A already!

It's hard to believe we're here already, but "Modern Art" is done!  Completing the track's subtly retro aesthetic, I used the mic'd amplifier for the bass in the mix, and panned it 50% right, exactly opposite the kick drum.  This is in contrast with my usual practice of using just the DI signal.

And that's "side A" of Chronicles of a Dead End!  My thoughts on this project, so far, are very positive.  I love how "Days to Midnight", now an apocalyptic wall-of-sound rock number, gets this off to a very atypical start for a prog album.  With "Faraway Island" I feel vindicated, as the weakest track on Escapade has, with a little re-arranging, become a song that works both as a regular track 2 and as side A's big epic.  This actually came about by accident: I found while mixing the keyboards that the organ solo between sections "A" and "B" of "Faraway Island" sounded annoying without having something else to ground it.  That something else ended up being a choir pad, played on the Jupiter-80, which serves the additional purpose of throwing the whole track into a different dimension at, essentially, the moment where the structure makes its first big departure from the simple folk ballad it initially is.

Moving over to side B now, we come to my long-time favourite song in the set.