A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

##The Story of “The Wakening/Soulsword”

As L__ is sleeping he hears voices in his head and feels a presence. He awakens to find it is not a dream. The voice and presence are those of Untwain, the Balancer. He recognizes it from his dream, and realizes that the sword is alive - and, more importantly, that it senses him and knows that he is the chosen Evil one of this generation. Untwain sends L__ images, showing him where to go to retrieve Untwain from the hidden, guarded lair in which it was hidden in the last war.

I feel the stirrings of the void in me
Ambition without power is lost
My soul is touched by gossamer-thin strings
A frozen, blackened spire fills my dreams
In the shadow of the Mountain Black, a cave
The call is buried deep inside
Guarded by the undead foe it waits
For the Chosen One to save

Trapped in steel, Untwain's soul
Waits for the one to hear his call
The prophecy, two become one whole
Before them both the world will fall

The Black Mountain is days of travel away, but the entire time Untwain draws L__ onward, showing him visions of the world they hope to create by destruction of the Good. Eventually, he reaches the Black Mountain cave, and with his vision used to shadows he finds it no trouble to dispose of the guardian and claim the sword…

The summons fills my thoughts and dreams
Draws me to its core
March on, day and night, possessed
Towards my goal and destiny
Untwain's soul merges with my mind
It gives me power and sight
Dispose the foe and take what's mine by right
Untwain, blade of ebony

Trapped in steel, Untwain's soul
Waits for the one to hear his call
The prophecy, two become one whole
Before them both the world will fall

After he touches the sword, visions and images more powerful than ever come into L__’s mind, as his mind merges with the mind of Untwain and together they see a prophecy of their coming battle, in which they fight the forces of Excalibur for the last time…

Gestalt of evil, Untwain and I
Blade of power, eyes of sight
Dominate all I see
To claim the world, my destiny

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##Writing “The Wakening/Soulsword”

“The Wakening” started life completely unconnected to this story. While I was in Skiptoe in early 1996, I was hanging out at Brian’s house one day and playing his Strat. I was just strumming, as I think Strats have a fantastic sound when being strummed - probably goes back to my days of listening to Dire Straits nonstop - but I digress. I remember trying to come up with something where the chords are intertwined with melodies together, by using the basic chord shapes and then adding fourths, sixths, sevenths, seconds/ninths, whatever… I started with a D minor and just started playing around with the melody, following its chord changes until I got the basic sequence: Dm - F - Am (sus2) - Em. I got Brian to play it on another guitar while I played just the melody, alone, an octave higher, and liked the results.

A couple of months later I was at Paul’s for what I was afraid would be the last time we’d jam. The “Blast from the Passed” had been a couple of months before, when we’d worked out “DeadRot”, “The WiggleSnake Blues”, and “Kill Ya Tonite”. We were planning on jamming that night, but we had a few minutes during the day before we had to go out for errand-running and meeting up with his family and stuff, so we turned on the recorder and I showed him the chord progression on acoustic. He played the rhythm, I strummed along, then did the melody, and then just totally took off. In our previous jam I had figured out most of Eric Peterson’s solo to Testament’s “Musical Death”, and it was in the same key (Dm), so I started copping some of his licks (like the octave-sliding bit), adding my own, and about 3 minutes later both Paul and I were very impressed with what we created. We titled it “The Last Hurrah” and didn’t think much about it after that.

After doing the EP version of Bellum, I knew I wanted to flesh out the album into a full-length, and one of the holes in the story was how Legolas got Untwain. I came up with the idea for that part of the story and, in something pretty rare for me at the time, came up with some of the lyrics first. I remembered “The Last Hurrah” and thought it would make a nice instrumental for the album, and started playing the chord progression as power chords - however, the original was in standard while the guitar I was playing at the time was a whole step down, but I still played the same position. That riff had an awesome power that way, and it immediately sparked the idea - instead of adapting “The Last Hurrah”, leave it completely intact as-is, and name it, the way Sabbath always named their solos, then coming out of the end with the sparse picking have the acoustic play D, then Db, then a big C power chord on the distorted guitar completes the modulation and starts the song proper.

That same chord progression made a nice chorus, so I used a few different chords for the verse, and true to my ‘not being able to sing and play at the same time’ self I decided to have the verse just be ringing chords, figuring that in the ‘full’ version I could have some slow arpeggios as well. The post-chorus melody was just built off of the main riff. The solo I did on the first tape felt great, but as I analyzed it later was in the wrong key - for some reason I went down another whole step at the start of it. This became fun when working out the final version of the song - I started by tabbing out the solo, noting the ‘main’ notes throughout, and then I wrote the backing chords off of those - that’s why the rhythm there doesn’t really follow and set pattern, but ebbs and flows along with the solo as they build together towards the end.

This had quite a bit of adaptation when it came time to record it for the album proper. Paul wasn’t all that enthusiastic about the song because it was just long and slow, for him, so I put more work into slightly adjusting the tempo throughout the song so it gets a bit faster and more intense as it goes on. The sliding octave melody over the main riff was added whole-cloth just before recording it - it sounded a bit empty, so I looked at the chords and just came up with it. The long ascent of that melody under the last bridge (“Gestalt of evil…” etc.) was another idea that just came up spur-of-the-moment, along with quoting the main melody from “The Wakening” at the end of it.

The vocals were the biggest adaptation - originally I did them just as I did on the boombox tape, in that moaning-whine type thing like My Dying Bride’s clean vocals. It sounded very weak on the first version of the proper album, so I asked ChorazaiM for ideas - he suggested the two-voice thing with death vocals and spoken word, which I did for most of the song - and then with my regular full-on singing at the end. That started out that way mainly because I didn’t think the two voice thing would work in that last verse and chorus, and then I realized that it worked with the idea of the story - the two voices join into a new one just like L__ and Untwain join mentally. I took that call-and-response idea to the next step when I finally got around to recording the leads for “The Wakening” - that’s how I got the idea to break the solo into two voices, with a ‘call and response’ type of phrasing which is also supposed to mirror the two minds coming together, and finally joining at the end when they play in harmony. I was always proud of how those songwriting details flowed from and mirrored what I was going for story-wise.

_If there was only one song from the original Bellum that I could re-cut with what I know now, it would be this one. It benefitted the most from the re-recording that I did in 2006, hoping that Aerik could lend his pipes to it, and it’s the one track of these eight that I’m the most sad about that I can’t share as I hoped it would be. As I reference in my blog a few years after this original entry, the additional Strat-clean track for rhythm under the acoustic part and extra solos, the better production, and the slight rearrangement of the verses and harmony part after the choruses really opened this up and made it shine.

And of course now that I’m teasing this I’m almost forced to have to release those 2006 sessions somehow. Would you take it karaoke style?)