The Storytelling XONE

As traced back through history, music has been a primary method of storytelling and historical chronicling. Before the modern age of music as a commodity, music served a purpose of keeping alive the great legends and stories of particular peoples. These songs would allow future generations to learn about the great events that shaped their particular community. Is that tradition still alive today?

It's hard to see the connection between the storytelling of old within today's music marketplace. Music seems to be more about making money than it is about tradition or story, especially in America. U.S. record companies are interested primarily in producing music that is very much like candy or gum. You chew on it for a while, and then the flavor goes away, so you spit it out and get a new piece. Storytelling is irrelevant to the moneymaking world of modern music.

Even Metal has seen this change as earlier, excellent, storyteller bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica have given way to bands like Mastodon, Hatebreed, and The Dillinger Escape Plan. The main difference between the old and the new metal is the clarity of vocals necessary to impart a storyline. Who the heck knows what these new bands are singing about? They could be giving us the formula to cold fusion and we wouldn't know it.

This is why a band like Evergrey is so important to XONE. They consistently deliver albums with fully intelligible lyrics/vocals with deep, thought-provoking subject matter. Their music is rich and full, but their vocals match. Many of these new bands will start playing, and I'm thinking: "That sounds really good", and then their singer starts in with his "Garf bark", and I no longer care about anything they are doing.

Not so with Evergrey. Whether it is a full-on chugging rhythm, or a slow vocal/piano song, a story will be told and it will be CLEAR. See, Evergrey still believes that storytelling is a MAJOR part of writing music, especially within the Metal genre. That personally means a lot to me. And it inspires XONE to continue to create music that delivers clear vocal lines that take the listener through some process of understanding a story or subject matter.

And even though the driving, chugging songs by Evergrey were the first thing to bring my ears to them, strangely enough, it is their singular vocal/piano songs that end up totally knocking me out by the end of a month with their latest CD. After experiencing this phenomenon on album after album by Evergrey, Ted and I decided to write one of these singular vocal/piano songs to continue our quest for storytelling in metal.

The new song is called REGRET, and it details something that we all can relate to: Living with the events from your past that you are not proud of. We all have dark sides, and inevitably, these dark sides compel us to impart a negative impact to someone or something in our lives. Living with that, and knowing you can never change those actions is an internal struggle of one's soul. They manifest themselves as REGRETS...