|
AKA Part III of the Signals in Time trilogy
I had been sitting on a lot of these for a very long time. I tend to jump from idea to idea and
project to project and stuff ends up on the shelf longer than they should. So is true for a handful of moments on
this album. I say handful, because a lot of these have been stitched together from working ideas (such is prog) to try
and make cohesive single pieces. Sometimes it works right out of the gate, sometimes there had to be some ham-fisting, sometimes
they had to be scrapped and re-worked from the ground up, etc. But throughout it all, I knew a couple things:
1. I really really like Genesis
2. I wanted to make a follow-up to Visitors and, by extension, Signals in Time. Probably as a trilogy
So I took those two "knowns" and chipped away over the course of two years in-between other projects.
Return of the Albatross is a sorta spiritual sequel to The Death of Ludwig Ulrich... from Signals in Time.
Right at the beginning, there's a callback to that album where you can hear church bells chiming the motif from the end of You are Not Alone.
The Death of... was about a WWI German pilot who eventually got shot down during a dogfight, so I wanted to have this song begin as if you're crawling
from the wreckage with the pilot-- alive, but barely. The chord progression that follows is a direct interpolation of the progression from that track also. The second-half
is extremely Genesis-coded, but doing some of the extra percussion like the timbales part was really fun. Shout out to the Rockman, I don't know if Mike Rutherford
used one, but I'll be damned if it doesn't evoke his 80s tone.
Lovers & Madmen features the first of two appearances of an extremely talented musician named David Hale that I met (in a Genesis discord lol). He nails Phil Collins'
tone and playing on drums, it still blows my mind. This track is very much Duke-era inspired. I think David picked up on that right from square one by giving a nod to Man of Our Times
with that first fill before the song kicks in after the intro. He also provided a few other textural parts like some synths and extra guitar bits that filled a hole in the production and arrangement
that I didn't even know was there. Not only that-- the biggest influence he had was in the second half. In my original demo, after the piano break, it rips into a double-time fast part. When David took a
stab at doing the drums, he came back with this slower, HEAVIER interpretation and now I can't imagine it at its original tempo at all. This worked way better.
Past Lives is, to quote a review someone did on RYM, "Camel-ian in spirit." Bang on. Nail on the head. I love Andy Latimer's playing, and didn't realize how we tend to have similar
philosophies when it comes to melodies and the like until I really listened to his/their stuff. So this is in the same spirit as Daedalus from Visitors. Just a fun guitar-lead ripper.
Trail's End is the big boy, and was a major pain. Visitors may have been longer, but this was way harder. I think it's almost certainly because the parts were and are very disparate. In fact, the
first section that you hear was a late replacement of a section that had been there for maybe a year. This song as a whole touches on all of the sounds I like in prog (or neoprog but I won't admit that willingly):
Rush in the first section, Genesis in the second, a little bit of Camel there too, and Genesis in the last bit too. Wow, writing it out, that list is not as deep as I was anticipating. At any rate, this song was a major pain but
I am ultimately happy with how it turned out, especially since my DAW crashed after spending a couple hours trying to mix the whole track and then having to do it all over again (with plugins broken). But I knew I couldn't give up on
it because it ultimatey leads into...
The Ledge.
This track, at the time of writing this (9/5/24) is probably my favorite song that I've ever released. I don't know if it's narcissitic to say that, but I guess ultimately I write music that I want to hear.
David Hale really tears it up on this track, and brought an insane energy to this weird 11/8 groove. Utterly nailed the vibe. I wrote this in early 2023 (January I think) after returning from my parent's camp, which sits
on what they call "The Ledge". So while thats it's literal meaning, I think it could be interpreted as any number of "ledges"; the ledge of a building looking down at the tops of heads, the edge of the universe, the brink of
one's sanity, etc.
But I think it ties into what I interpret this albums theme/concept to be quite nicely: I once read an article about how a 7 year old had vivid nightmares (or memories) of being stuck under rubble at the World Trade Center. All
the comments on this were people telling stories about how they, their kids, their siblings, and so on all had similar situations. One little boy would ask where her friend was, and knew her by name. Another said they remembered
their "old mommy" before they fell and hit their head and "fell asleep." Almost all of these stories ended in a similar way; the kids "grew out" of the memories and could eventually no longer remember them.
I began thinking about 'captial L' Life like a timeline, on which the tracks of our individual lives are placed. There's overlap at the end, and the beginning-- enough to see a hazy memory of what used to be. Evenutally the overlap
ends as the timeline keeps moving, but just for a moment, those two lives touch. Almost like the passing of a baton.
Once I put those pieces together, I looked at the art for the album (which had already been done for maybe 2.5 years by this point) and realized that's exactly what the cover is depicting. Not only that, the Signals in Time/Visitors/Timelines trilogy
have always had themes of a single consciousness traveling through and amongst many others. Simply, we are Signals in Time; Visitors along the Timelines.
|
mouse over to flip record
|
