Bellum infinitum - the beginning (pt. 2)
posted on 14 Apr 2005 under category History
So, as I left off last, it was early 1993 and I had just shown Storm Over Avalon to the guys in Early Warning and we worked out a version to play. I thought that had gotten the bug out of my system, since it basically told the overarching story (evil and good fight throughout history) in one four and a half minute nutshell.
And so I wrote more, and though none of it was actually finished as songs with Early Warning, the ideas were taken more seriously and some got pretty far along before they just got abandoned. Later, in Skiptoe, I didn’t worry about not writing stuff as they had a very defined sound and I didn’t want to upset things. I used that discipline in my own writing, but without really thinking of keeping a band going or whatever… Then, in 1996, when I was ‘solo’ and had reformed Rampage with Paul, I had the chance to dust off and update some of those older songs I had written in the meantime. It took a couple of sessions to get around to dredging up “Storm”, but when I did I thought about that earlier, over-ambitious idea to do a whole album about that story. Well, there was nothing stopping me now, and I had written probably an album’s worth of keep-worthy other material already, so I figured it was time to start, and so on December 27, 1996, Paul and I recorded the first version of the Bellum Infinitum EP.
Yes, EP. There were only five songs.
“Storm…” was already done, once I restored it to its original form. “Excalibur” was another natural addition since Paul wrote the music originally and it was easily one of the best of that old “Pissed off Teenz” era stuff. Though it wasn’t really about the story itself, it did talk about Excalibur, which is the Balancer of Untwain. (Oh, that reminds me, I have to get into the mythology of the album, since it has its own world, but that’s another post…) “Rainbow Skies” was modified from a song I had started on with Early Warning under another title. “The Final Day/Into the Great Beyond” was a compilation of riffs for an instrumental I started working on with Skiptoe and some other riffs I came up with while writing “Bloody Leg”. “Sisters of Death” was the newest of these songs, written pretty much in the car on the way down to Savannah that time. The individual song descriptions will trace the evolutions of those songs from their ancestors, but overall that was the story - Rainbow Skies, Sisters of Death, Storm Over Avalon, Excalibur, and The Final Day.
That turned out so well that I decided to ignore my head which said “You’ve told the story, leave it” and listen to my muse, who said “not bad, now FINISH IT!”. So I started writing more. In that last session Paul and I jammed and came up with the core parts of what would become “The Vow”. I cleaned it up and added the lyrics. Then, to work a bit more of story development in, I crafted “Soulsword”, and led into it with “The Wakening”, which was just an old instrumental Paul and I worked out with a new title. We recorded that version in May 1997, and that was that.
Almost.
The last changes were when I was in preproduction for this album the first time around. First, adding an instrumental outro was a given, as I had just become hooked on Graveland about that time. Also, I wanted more story in there, sort of documenting his meteoric rise to power. I’m not sure when this idea merged with me wanting to rerecord the old Early Warning song “Nemesis”, but somehow they combined and so I worked out a version of that and put it in the middle, where it is now.
There were a couple of evolutionary dead-ends that were trimmed, I seem to remember. As I said before, it was mostly dredged up from old D&D games and campaigns, and there was one side-story where L__ was at war with the Assassins’ Guild, since he wanted to kill their leader and take it over, but ended up on the run for his life. I had worked in this power-struggle among evil to see who will challenge good, but decided it was distracting and leaving it out made the story more archetypal (which is what I was going for). I remember the song title “Manhunt” from this period, rather early on, but I don’t think that got any farther than that. Another title I remember is “Army of the Night”, where he uses the power of Untwain to put together his army, but after I rewrote Nemesis it seemed redundant, so I didn’t bother with it.
Now, just to whet some appetites, Aerik and I have discussed possibly adding a song or two to the new version, but we’ll have to see where it could work and whether or not we can write something that will fit…
(And, after doing the rerecording, it turns out that possible new song never happened. Oh well. My greater lament is that it is now doomed to remain unreleased, unless I get another singer or give it another crack on the vocals myself. I am a slightly better singer now…)