A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

##The Story of “Excalibur”

When L__ first touches Untwain, their minds merge, and the totality of the history, the eternal war that Untwain has been through time and again, floods into L__’s mind. The successes, the defeats, the mistakes and lessons of those wars fill L__ with dread, but also with promise - he vows not to make the same mistakes as before.

In addition to the past, though, Untwain shows visions of the future, the slaughter and conquest that L__ and Untwain are destined for… The destruction and massacre of the followers of Untwain’s Balancer, the icon of good, Excalibur…

Sword of goodness, gleaming white
Stuck in stone, day and night
Living on, strong and near
It does not disappear

Living steel in undead stone
The one to wield it is unknown

Drawn out by proper hand
Wielded by proper man
Sword of steel, Excalibur
Never know when it fears good

Evil lives and runs at night
It can kill and murder right
Decapitated bodies found
Headless men just thrown around
Stuck in stone, steel survives
Living on in modern times

Never know where it goes
In the night, guard your souls
Life's not enough to ward off death
Never hear your final breath

Never know you're in Hell
What you fear is not a spell

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##Writing “Excalibur”

It’s more like translating than writing, really. This was one of the many songs that Paul, Ben, and I did on the boombox back in 1989 on that one fateful summer afternoon that spawned the entire idea of Rampage. We came up with this one just like any other - Either Paul or I came up with a riff (this one was Paul’s), we rehearsed all of about two or three repetitions and watched each other for the changes as we recorded. Ben just came up with the lyrics and title off the top of his head. He told us later that day that the title came from the comic book of the same name (I was a big Marvel X-books junkie at the time), but instead of singing about the characters in that book (which he already did, in “Five Little Heroes”) he sang about the sword itself, and about the good followers of it being obliterated by evil.

When ‘writing’ it for this album, it was a piece of cake - I knew all the riffs, but the lyrics were a bitch. I listened closely, repeatedly, to the original, but had to make a lot of ‘best guesses’ in spots. However, the holes left me opportunity to tweak the story a bit more into the vein of the Bellum story instead of as a standalone. Paul and I jammed this one out a couple of times in the later boombox phase with me on guitar and him on drums, and that’s when he started playing with the dynamics and changing up the beats - a lot of that influenced how it eventually got recorded.

I’m not sure where I got the idea to add the keyboards, except that I had been listening to Emperor at the time and wanted to put some keys on the album somewhere and that seemed a natural spot. The ‘chorus’ riff is just two chords, so putting in a keyboard melody helped flesh it out and stand apart from the verse which is also just a couple of chords.

(This one probably changed the least when I rerecorded it in 2006, with the only change aside from the production in general being that I had access to a much better software synth, and so the drawbar organ sound was actually worthwhile - and, in true Jon Lord fashion, I ran it through a distorted guitar amp, also synthesized, and it got that bright-but-dirty semi-kinda-if-you-squint-with-your-ears Deep Purple keyboard sound. Man, I love technology.)