A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

Well, I’ve done four of the five songs on Monolith… so far, so I might as well round it off with what amounts to the title track. As should have been obvious from the opening riff, this was very much inspired by Black Sabbath, from riff to arrangement to mood. It was also the ‘newest’ song on the album, and was mostly the reason the album changed from Doom Metal to Monolith… at all, so to talk about this song would mean talking about the album as a whole… As most of you know, I had songs from all of the first four pro-studio releases written back in the boombox days. I always intended them to be released in somewhat coherent packages, of course - misogynistic joke/humor songs on Misogyny…, old-school satanic death/thrash on This End Up, and the concept album Bellum Infinitum. I also wanted to cover the Doom Metal angle (understandable, since I wrote the song, after all… :) ), and the three songs I had ‘left over’ at the time seemed to fit the theme of doom one way or the other: “Doom Metal” is obvious, but “Doomsayer” is about one who forecasts doom (erroneously or not - I prefer to think erroneously; it makes his own misery that much more useless…) and “Wanderlust” is about a guy going to hell (Then, of course, Purgatory and Heaven, but I only covered the Hell part - I don’t think we’ll EVER see a metal band tackle the Purgatorio. Hm…. ).

As with the other albums, I had new ideas for new songs as I was recording the older ones, and I knew some other areas I wanted to cover with Doom Metal - a stoner-doom song (of course), Jack the Ripper (with Whitechapel)…. and one was an idea I had (while in the shower one day, oddly - you’d be surprised where some of my ideas for other songs came to me, but that’s another very ripe blog topic I’ll save for another day….) that sprang from a small phrase I thought would be perfect for a doom song - “Cursed with Existence”. You hear of doom metal songs that berate life and cry for death, but how miserable would it be that even death after life would be torture and you wish you had never even existed at all? An intriguing idea, and one that I filed in the back of my mind, but never thought much about…

Until I was trying to think of ideas of what to add to the Doom Metal album when the time came to finish it off - I had the old three, some covers, and Whitechapel. I needed at least one more song, and since “Doom Metal” wasn’t cutting it anymore I needed a new title for the album as well.

Enter Black Sabbath.

I was listening to a lot of doom at the time for inspiration (how ironic :) ), and one day “Volume 4” came up to the top of the play queue. I knew I wanted a Sabbath cover, but didn’t know which one until “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener” played, and it was that one day, that one play, that eight minutes of my life that made me really decide what to do with the album, that changed Doom Metal to MONOLITH TO AN ABANDONED PAST.

First off I decided I wanted to cover “Wheels of Confusion/The Straightener”. Then, as it was bedtime, I crawled into bed, still thinking about the song, and how WoC is the perfect metal song, that perfectly encapsulates the nihilism at the core of metal. “So I found that life is just a game / Don’t you know there’s never been a winner / Try your hardest just to be a loser / The world will still be turning when you’re gone…” The world goes on without you - you’re not important.

And that’s when it hit me - someone who feels like that must feel as if existence itself is a curse - and thus I had the emotional hook to the song. And, in thinking about suicide, I thought of tombstones, and the title popped into my head - “Monolith to an Abandoned Past” - where the “Monolith” is a tombstone and the “Abandoned Past”, of course, is the life left behind when one suicides. I liked that title, but I also liked “Cursed with Existence”, but the image in my mind of one of those old megalithic tombstones made me think that was a better album title, so I decided to do the old Sabbath “name your solo” trick and name the outro “Monolith…” (another nod to “The Straightener”).

Which is all great, except that all I had was an idea and a song title - but I also had inspiration, and as we all know 99% of the work is in getting that inspiration.

So, I started hammering on riffs, and thinking “Sabbath” came up with that main opening riff to the song…. slow and lumbering, mixing the low chord with the single-note riffing, slides and bends, the nice symmetry of the riff being basically three minor third intervals that fit into Dm (plus the tritone of course - GOTTA have the tritone). Simple enough to work on its own and be easily adaptable… the verses I had the idea for building up to with a bass-built riff, something ultra-simple like that middle bass break in Candlemass’ “Demon’s Gate”, and that is where that thumping bass part came from - once I added the drone on guitar and modulated that entire part up a half step. The chorus was easy enough too, though it somewhat shifts gears it makes me think of Vitus or Sabbath in their heyday. The middle break part was just me thinking of what I could do with a rhythmic drum-bass ‘beat’ section and the guitars playing counterpoint. It fell together pretty quickly.

As did the lyrics, in a different way - thinking of suicide versus life is easy enough, imagining wanting to die when life is a burden, but getting one step beyond that was a bit tough at first - what would be so bad that even death would be a torture?

Well, enter atheism. Or non-supernaturalism or whatever you want to call it.

The key word in the title was ‘Existence’. Cursed not with ‘Life’ but ‘Existence’. Well, if this life is all there is, and when we’re dead our personalities disappear and our bodies become worm food, we’re gone - but what does that REALLY MEAN for our consciousness? Obviously we weren’t around before we were born, so it’s not that tough to conceive nonexistence - but that was before we existed. From nothing, we came to be - and THEN what? From sense and sentience to nothingness is something I can’t comprehend - and what I can’t comprehend I don’t know - and what I don’t know, I fear.

At this point, for the theist, religion would step in and I’d be fine - or just deluded up until the point that it’s all over and then I won’t be around to worry. But, being an atheist, I don’t have that luxury. There’s a big nothing out there coming for me, and I don’t know when or where or how, and worse, I don’t know WHAT. And, I’ll admit, it fucking scares the shit out of me, but my rationality won’t let me sidestep it, so the best I can do is (try to) ignore it/not think about it/distract myself.

So, far from being some detached thing, *I* am cursed with existence. And that was the final hook into me writing the song. For someone who has nothing to look forward to, this life is all we have, and I do my best at making a good go of it - but if I didn’t make such a good go at it, well, that’s what the song is about:

Existence is Life, and Life is Pain
Pursued by suffering from cradle to grave
Happiness teases as it baits the snare
What good are drops of joy in oceans of despair

Through suffering without end
Futility to try again
Hope is like the Siren's call
Bring those who seek to deadly fall

Never to feel
Never to live
Never to love
Only to die in pain

So far, so standard - life is a burden. Most doom metal stops there. But what’s the next logical step?

Death, the gate to the other side
Only there is nothing to find
No afterlife, no existence at all
What will become of ME when I am gone?

Never to feel
Never to think
Never to live
Only to know that I will never be again

Death isn’t just a little pain and mess and then sleep or happiness. YOU’RE NOT THERE TO SLEEP OR BE HAPPY. YOU’RE NOTHING. And what is being nothing like AFTER having been something? I don’t know what it’s like on that side, but from this end it’s torture…

And on my monolith
to the past I left behind:
"I curse life for the joys that tease
I curse death for the peace I'll never find..."

I don't want to live
I don't want to die
I want to never have been at all

And even maybe that is looking at it the wrong way, but it’s the only way that my mind can make sense of it - if I never existed, there would be no ‘me’ to be afraid of what post-existence nonexistence ‘feels like’. I just wouldn’t be - no shitty life, no fear of death, no fear of what’s beyond it.

But, alas, from the nothingness sprang me, cursed to have to put up with all this shit and with nothing, truly NOTHING, to look forward to. Cursed with existence….

(That’s such a perfect stopping point, but I feel compelled to brag up the solo section at least a little bit, since I was rather proud of it. The cyclical nature of the whole song, all those twists and turns, ending up right at the intro riff again was a nice touch I think, and the solo you hear on the album was literally my scratch track, totally improvised, first take, warts and all - it just felt too good to throw away. While I like lead playing, I don’t necessarily think all my leads are really superduper, but that is one I’m really proud of - it sounds like I felt.)

(Also, to put to rest a potential rumor-in-the-making - the ‘stoner’ song I wanted for this record got ditched in a heartbeat when I wrote this song - this song was too miserable to have some fluffy ‘let’s trip on LSD/come have some mushroom tea’ song anywhere near it. Besides, as an indulgence they’re fine, but as a song topic you really have to be the right kind of person to write a song about it that doesn’t sound goofy. I’m at least perspicacious enough to know I’m not such a person…)

(Besides, I literally never got any farther than a title - ‘Trip’ - not even a main riff…)

(If this isn’t the one song I’m most proud of writing it’s definitely in the top 3. My only gripe was that it wasn’t until a few weeks after I released the album that I had forgotten to do some bass EQ work on the bass tracks, so they’re a little flat compared to how I wanted them to sound. I guess I’ll give this one another go some day, if I think I can do the solo justice again. Still, if I never touch it again I’d still be happy with it.)