From the album The Lines of History
Lyrics
Dined with red wine and white lies
A game of citing lines
As seen through reborn eyes
The dead we live among
Turn to fuel for the outcome
Mends any damage done
By small acts of rebellion
Praise
The will to overrun
What our Fathers have written
Preys
In this state of unknown
Retrogression
In this state not our own
A lone echo
A lone echo
Alone
Echo an oath for change
And hope plied for gain
Swallow more of the same
A vote cast in vain
Notes
Andy (click to show)
Andy (click to hide)
Axel and Rug put down the basics for this song one weekend during a songwriting session in Rochester. I wasn’t in attendance because a) Axel has cats and I’m deathly allergic and b) it’s Rochester. Anyway, they pieced together the song in its first iteration, sent it to Jim and I, who were working on other band stuff in Minneapolis, and prefaced it with, “if they don’t like this, we are leaving the band.” In it’s final form, the song is probably the best example of a real collaborative effort that the band has had up to this point. It is more “us” than any other song. Thrice and STP. Sludge and Post-Rock. Guitar interplay, dynamic vocals, flowing bass lines, alternate tunings, etc.
Axel (click to show)
Axel (click to hide)
The first riff I wrote for this song was the clean introduction riff. It was inspired by Swallow The Sun, and I intended it to be LKS’s doom epic, a 15 minute orgy of slow crushing riffs.
Of course, that’s not the way it turned out, but that’s not to say that I’m unhappy with the result. Rug and I had a blast writing the rest of the song, and we were able to throw in some really subtle allusions to other bands (Stone Temple Pilots and Thrice, bonus points to whoever figures out which songs we used for inspiration). I love doing stuff like that…it’s a way to pin your influences on your sleeve without sounding like total rip-offs.
The dream of turning this song into a doom epic still rattles around in my head, though. I might yet write it some day.
Rug (click to show)
Rug (click to hide)
This song was originally for our 7 Billion album, written in 2007/2008. However, this song, along with a couple others, sounded very different than the other material we already had for the album, so when we came back from hiatus with a new musical vision, we thought those songs would fit in much better with the new music we were writing. After reading an interview with Zakk Wylde, I decided to try out one of his tricks, detuning the 6th string all the way down to the same pitch as the low string on a 7 string, B (or in our case, A#). It ends up being pretty weird at first, normal chord shapes can result in some pretty fun and crazy sounds. Axel modified the tuning slightly, by also dropping his high string down to C. One weekend while he was still living in Rochester, I drove down and we spent the weekend in his man cave basement, playing guitar and drinking beer. We spent a lot of time bouncing riffs off of each other in this tuning, and I then altered mine even further, by dropping the A string down to F, so I could play power chords on the low strings. The results of all this tuning madness are some really, really fun riffs to play, particularly the ending riff. Once we finished writing it, we sent it off to Jim and Smallz, hoping they liked it…because if they didn’t, we were quitting (we’re only half kidding here!!). Thankfully they were big fans.
On the other hand…all of the tuning changes we did have made it a complete chore to play that song in practice and at shows – because it completely wrecks the intonation on the other strings due to the change in string tension, it throws the neck out of whack. We aren’t a huge band like Sevendust either, so we don’t have an army of guitars at our disposal for tuning changes, or the space to even put them on stage. We do the best we can though…a good song came out of it, but somehow I doubt that we’ll be revisiting alternate tunings in the future.
