"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.