MATT's NOTES
There is a lot to be said about the creation of these songs, especially musically. That said, my memory there is nowhere near as accurate as that of Todd so I will leave that to him. Meanwhile, as the lyricist of pretty much everything here, please join me for a short journey through the song concepts and lyrics.
Chaos
A love song, really. The name for this song originally came from the fairly chaotic piano introduction that it had when we began writing it. As we began to flesh it out though, I decided to go with it as a song title as well. Doing some internet searching, I came across a great poem (“Chaos Theory” by Ronald Wallace) on JSTOR which I decided to use as a basis for the lyrics. Originally I borrowed a lot more from Mr. Wallace, but over time I pared many of those ideas out. Even so, all due credit to Mr. Wallace for the original inspiration. Reflecting on my own life, I was struck by the amount of chance and coincidence that had coincided, even collided, to land me where I am today. Butterfly Effect if you will. We never really know where we are going until we get there, and of course, in hindsight, it was completely obvious all along. Or so we tell ourselves, anyway. And then, just when we think we have it all figured out, everything changes yet again. Sixpence None The Richer is hiding in here somewhere.
Bad Bitch
Not bad meaning good, but rather bad meaning awful. Among other things. My personal hate song; self-explanatory. You know who you are.
Marvelous World (Losing Season)
Pure Elliott Smith. “Miss Misery” is one of my favorite songs and probably one of the best songs ever written; this is my futile attempt to get even close to that. I love songs in waltz time; there is a certain tension within the three-four pulse that is simultaneously both beautiful and foreboding. I tried to reflect that in the lyrics, especially the chorus, which is really two choruses in one (a bit of a nod to “And You and I”). We walk through some days in beautiful oblivion even while everything is collapsing around us, and on others, it’s all we can do to pick ourselves up and crawl through the trenches. There is a great saying that you don’t truly become an adult until there’s no one left to remember you as a child; this is kind of about that.
Whisper
Literally twenty-five years in the making, maybe more, and as close to a love letter to progressive rock as we will ever get. I will leave the telling of the musical story (which is long) to Todd, but there’s plenty to say about the lyrics as well. This song started as a three-movement piece called “Rain,” which was nominally about the political climate of the late ’80s and early ’90s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Apartheid, the Good Friday Agreement, the first Gulf War, and so on. From there it became even longer, with more movements, and at one point was titled “Madeline” for reasons that I (quite rightly) no longer remember. Right. So, once we had settled on the musical structure that you hear here today, I needed to come up with a suitably grand concept for the song. On top of that, I needed to completely forget all of the other lyrics and melodies that the song had been saddled with over all that time. I struggled with all sorts of various ideas: the nascent war in Ukraine, various biblical themes, characters I had created or observed in real-life, or both, but nothing was really resonating. Taking a step back, it occurred to me that I was looking for an anti-hero, an internal struggle, a suitable cast of supporting players, something along the lines of Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy, maybe. Eventually - and honestly I am not entirely sure how - I stumbled across one of my favorite movies, “The Manchurian Candidate” (the Sinatra version, sorry Denzel) and after doing a quick mental map I realized it would be a nearly perfect fit. Of course, some artistic license was taken, and it is not a truly authentic retelling of any version of the story, but rather a bit of an amalgam of all of them (and with a suitably unanswered ending. Did he? Didn’t he? We’ll never know!). Loaded with prog rock Easter Eggs - see if you can find them all.
Zaff’s Fez
We have a friend named Mike Zaffarese, aka “Zaff,” who is an excellent guitarist and all-around good dude that we met in our New Brunswick band days. To the best of my knowledge, he has never owned or even worn a fez. The title of this track, therefore, remains an enigma.