And now for the final entry in the "story behind the song" series, this time of course the final track "Where Earth & Sky Unite".

The inspiration for this one came from a frustrating experience I had on New Year's Eve last year that left me driving like mad through Brandenburg at dusk looking for a gas station to pick up some last minute supplies before everything closed for the holidays - not an easy thing to do.  I was literally in the middle of nowhere with no GPS or other way of orienting myself or getting some directions and not a soul was around.  I passed through tiny village after tiny village, all like ghost towns.  The sunlight was fading fast and at the point just before complete darkness I looked out over a field and managed to find some solace in a beautiful scene of flat land silhouetted against an icy blue sky and that crisp point that created the horizon instantly registered in my mind as the place "where earth & sky unite".

This idea kept running through my mind for weeks into the new year and I considered writing something about the actual experience that had inspired it but somehow I didn't want to dwell on the idea of driving around lost.  Instead I let the idea take its own direction and eventually found myself thinking about the beauty of nature in general and some of the most important places in nature that I have been lucky enough to see and that instilled a bit of hope in me at critical moments.  But while I was thinking about these places it occured to me that some of them don't even exist anymore - one example being the forest near my childhood home where I spent endless hours playing and exploring.  It is now gone and a subdivision has taken its place.  Sad.  And not the only place where this is happening.

I started to wonder where it would all end, how long it would be before almost all of nature was either destroyed or manipulated to the point of no return, whether the only thing left would be the memories I have of those places.  It also made me realize that I am not sure how much longer I am willing to live in a big city.  The lure of nature and calm and quiet is getting stronger for me, a fairly normal thing I guess for a small town boy who grew up next to a real forest and wetlands.

The only question is, when I am ready to get out of here, will there be anywhere left to go?
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Shock & Awe 06/21/2010
 
This is the first in a series of posts I will be doing about the songs on the debut E.P.  Track number one is of course the title track "Shock & Awe" and the inspiration for it came after hearing about music being used in torture sessions in Guantanamo Bay without the consent of the musicians who made it.  When this became public, most of the musicians whose music had been used were, as to be expected, pretty damned pissed off and rightfully so.  If you're not familiar with the story you can read more about it here:

Performers Angry About Music Used In Gitmo

But the song isn't specifically about this situation even though it was the initial thing that got me thinking in this direction.  As I was reading about this I remembered hearing something about how music blasted out of loudspeakers on helicopters had been used to scare the enemy in Vietnam and then some other movie images of soldiers getting "pumped up" by certain kinds of heavy, aggressive music came to mind.  In general I started thinking about how music can be used in what I consider to be negative ways.  The title itself is taken from a fairly recently coined military term for going into a battle with so much firepower and force that the enemy is basically shocked into submission.  Quick and relatively painless is the idea.  Except for the innocent civilians who tend to get in the way...but that's a whole other tangent.

Anyway, I had this riff that seemed almost like something that could have been turned into one of these songs that the military likes to use so I thought, hell, why not?  Except this one will have twist and turn it back on itself!  So after the verses which seem like something a bunch of grunts would get a real rush from, the whole thing turns against them in the final refrain, basically saying "Hey you suckers!  Gotcha!  This song is not what you thought it was and maybe you should think again!"

I wouldn't call it an "anti-war" song as such, but more of a statement against aggression of any kind especially when it is so uncontrolled that it results in the death of innocent bystanders.

The fact that the vocals went into a kind of rap or spoken word form was really just a spontaneous experiment that I ended up really liking.  Hope you do too.  All for now.
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