As a progressive metal band, XONE has plenty of fans who are “prog heads”. These are guys and gals (o.k. mostly guys) who enjoy shredding guitar riffs and weird time signatures. And we love you folks for your technical questions about chord progressions and which strings we use.
Increasingly, however, XONE seems to appeal to less technical listeners as well. Someone who enjoys metal (or being introduced to it), but doesn’t necessarily know their Dorian from their Ionian. These folks are constantly asking us about one thing it seems – the lyrics. We hear comments, like “Dude play that song about Vietnam again”, (which would be Hero). Or, “I don’t really know who plays bass in the band, but I love the singing.”
So in order to educate our less geeky brothers and sisters about XONE (and because we just posted the lyrics), I’m going to discuss some of the things that were going through our minds as we were writing the lyrics. I will try to cover one song in each article, and for this article I will be discussing the first song that Will and I wrote collaboratively on – Face This World.
Back in the fall of 2003, XONE consisted of Will, myself (I joined in the Summer of 2003), and Kirk (our former drummer). I had talked with Will several times about adding both vocals and lyrics to our songs. At that time Will was doing rhythm and lead guitar, but we had not yet talked him into doing vocals. In fact, we felt confident that we would be able to audition a front man who would be able to deliver the technical lyrics that we felt would best fit with our music.
So, after discussing with Will what he felt would best fit the musical content of Face This World (which at that time was known by a working title – Pilate), I set to work listening to the music and trying to get a feel for what lyrical content might work best. After several incarnations and some long discussions with a good friend of mine (Mike), I decided that I wanted to focus on the topic of psychological solitude. In particular, when deep in philosophical discussion Mike and I both concurred that as the famous psychonaut Timothy Leary had stated, “You’re born alone, you trip alone, you die alone.” And from this statement, and while I listened to our song and contemporized further, I really began to see that even though you have family and friends, compatriots and co-workers, no one can bear the choices, joys, burdens, and sorrows you experience. In other words – you must face this world alone.
No some of you might be thinking that after such an “aha!” moment that the song would be written. Far from it. After that initial session and several subsequent sessions of listening to the music and attempting to explore the idea of facing this world alone, I had come up with a very rough sketch of the song that very vaguely resembles its final incarnation. In fact, it was rough and hardly high quality lyrical content at that point. But what I had come up with was a concept that I felt was compelling.
At that time certain pieces of the song really came together and worked:
We are all born in darkness
We face this world alone….
Enter the dark
Enter the mind….
In a haze where thoughts fade quickly
but neurons fire in time
Locked in a state of lucid dreaming
I look in my mind's eye….
But a lot of it did not. So I came back to Will at that point and said, hey I’ve got this concept that I really like. Can you take a look at what I’ve got here so far and let me know what you think? And so Will took the idea home and worked on it. The next week I asked him what he thought. He said that the idea really worked for him – he got it and that he thought he could add some things to really make it solid and make it work so it would no longer be poetry, but an actual song. So I told him to go for it and that I was looking forward to what he came up with.
A couple of weeks later, Will brought his version of Face this World to practice so I could have a look at what he’d come up with. I was immediately impressed with how he had built certain parts so that they had real flow – like a story, but I was skeptical if it could be sung and how it would work with the song. After stating this, he sung for me several of the parts and I was sold. From that point on, Will and I have often written our lyrics together in this format or by collaborating directly together. We’ve found that doing it this way really makes you clarify your ideas (so you can explain it to the other person) and helps give the song structure.
As you can probably tell from our process and the time and care we exert, Will and I feel very strongly about having quality, discernable, and meaningful lyrics. We try to write our lyrics in a way that is direct enough to convey a point, but multifaceted enough to cause the listener to reflect in a unique and responsive manner.
We’d definitely like to hear from you about how this song makes you feel. Please email me and let me know what you think Face This World means to you.
Email: xonebass@yahoo.com
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