From the album New Years Project
Lyrics
Open letter to a faker
It appears that heart was just ripe for stringing
Only bought because I’m no better
Isn’t that why I’m so damn eager to befriend?
Friends with benefits or for a common goal
Filling the voids of all those who can’t stand
To be alone – to eat, sleep, die alone
Apparently best doesn’t mean the same
The closeness we need fades with age
As you let your business and pleasure mix in unlucky ways
Put up – be a man who lays a word of truth down on the line, or
Shut up, because experience without maturity is such a waste of time
Mistakes become unreadable to all but me
First impressions only mattered when everyone still wore their heart on their sleeve
Full of promise / fat with promises
But I’ve run out of doubts worth fielding
Anger always stems from solitary fear
My failure to relate your cries or sympathize stems from a place I have to find
But who will be my guide?
Pay attention
Passive rival – excuse my bid for late survival
Your words won‘t carry weight
Notes
Rug (click to show)
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I’m fairly pleased with the diversity of riffs I brought to the table for this song, and we continued our theme of getting a cool part together, then writing variations, and putting it all together, which is on display all throughout EMMF. The main verse riff I’d written after reading a guitar lesson on string skipping, and I wanted to add some of that into my bag of tricks. Of course, I couldn’t just skip a single string, I had to go from the lowest to the highest immediately, so that made for an interesting time trying to get that to sound clean at the tempo we played it, but it was great as a practice tool. Another extremely tough riff in the song is the speed picking riff right before legato guitar break. I have this problem of writing riffs that I can’t play, and then just forcing myself to improve – and I bit off more than I could chew on this one. I spent more time practicing this riff than anything else on the album, and when it came time to record, I just couldn’t get it done. Axel has a MONSTER of a right hand, and he blazed through his harmony of the riff without any issues, so I just had him record my part on this for the sake of the album. From time to time, we’ll end up recording each other’s parts on songs if someone is having problems, or if he or I play that particular part with a better feel. You do it for the good of the album, but I didn’t like doing it because it really felt like letting the rest of the dudes down – you want to be able to pull your own weight on the album, and that took me a long time to make peace with that. I’m a competitive person and I don’t like having to rely on someone else to do something I can’t do.
However, the most interesting thing on this song, is something that I have yet to hear any other band pull off – the half time 8th note triplet breakdown. I started playing the main verse riff in triplets super slow as a joke, to parody Metallica (they’ve mentioned in interviews how they’ll occasionally play Battery super slow and call it Dead Battery), and also to give the other dudes a laugh – as they think I can only think and play in triplets, sextuplets, things like that. So, what started as joke to make everyone laugh, somehow ended up being the beginning of the end of the song. I guess they all thought it was cool, and we spent a lot of time working with it to have Sam play straight time and figure out where it cycled through. So, in a musical career that I’ve spent stealing riffs and ideas from everyone under the sun, at least I helped create something original and new – the half time 8th note triplet breakdown!!!
