A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

“Blood of Dionysus” was the third of the songs that I wrote from the original email of lyrics that Dementor sent me in 2001. Since it was a drinking song I figured it would be a good one to have more of a Venom/Motorhead rocking-metal feel to, as well as using an A-string-based riff rather than the low E (well, G rather than D, since I tune down a whole step, but you know what I mean). The lyrics, as delivered, lent themselves well to a sort of ‘rock-metal on SPEED’ type of song:

I choose to swallow this Poison
Blood of Dionysius inside the chalice
Fuck up my head 'til perversion
I drink this to the gods of self malice

Blood of Dionysus - the Poison of Choice...
Blood of Dionysus - to Fuck up my head
Blood of Dionysus - the Poison of Choice...
Blood of Dionysus - I wish you were dead

Get all fucked up, destroy my brain
To welcome death, and forget the pain
Hatred burns, deep inside
Misanthropy, I hate this life

Blood of Dionysus - the Poison of Choice...
Blood of Dionysus - to Fuck up my head
Blood of Dionysus - the Poison of Choice...
Blood of Dionysus - I wish I was dead

Again, this is one of the ones where the lyrics as delivered changed from what I was given to write with. I saw the verse/chorus structure here and thought that I’d use the main riff for the verse, that step-up to the IV as a bridge between verse and chorus, and then the main riff again as the chorus, with that stop and descending riff turnaround between verses. Now, hearing the way that Dementor sang it on the demo, I can’t imagine it any other way, and I think it flows better the way it’s been recorded (three times now - demo, The Wakening, and the live album). Also, you see he switched the order of the first stanza here - again, I think the way everyone heard it works better than the original conception, but that back-and-forth is one of the best parts of writing by collaboration - in some ways, it’s almost more fun to play off of what someone else comes up with.

Given the more rock/lighthearted feel compared to the rest of the songs, the blues-solo breakdown was a given, and in this one I just stuck to the traditional 12-bar arrangement, deliberately changing some of the chord accents and basslines to quote the way Cronos did it on “Teacher’s Pet”. I kept up the Venom-song quoting in the rest of the riffing as well, with that pinch-harmonic pulloff in the main riff directly pulled from “Heaven’s on Fire” and the IV-chord step-up (where the verses are in the song) pretty much cribbed from the similar chord progression in “Leave Me in Hell”. Hey, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best! Like Paul Stanley said in an interview once, “it’s okay to steal [when songwriting], as long as you steal a diamond and not a piece of glass.” Again, I think this one came together really quickly, so much that I don’t remember writing it all that much. Oh, that songwriting were that easy again…