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©2004 Din Within
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Running Time: 11:57 |
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Additional Musicians:
Scott McGill (Nylon Guitar Solo)
Mike Ian (Drums, Additional Engineering) |
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Sound Clips (MP3 format):
[ Clip 1 ]
[ Clip 2 ]
[ Clip 3 ]
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Late for work again today
My alarm clock ran away
Happy Monday, Mr. Man; here we go again
Tie is stained, car wouldn't start
My shave looks more like modern art
Missed six meetings and it's only ten o'clock
Seething bosses in my face
Lame excuse to plead my case
One more screw-up and I'm gonna be replaced
I can't take it anymore
Pressure's too much to ignore
I'm a powder keg just waiting to explode
I... am tired of fighting wars
For the corporate generals, I'm just a trench-foot soldier boy
I... am through with being ignored
When can I start over? I'll do better than...
Better Than Before
Check the phone, there's a message
It's my lawyer with more great news
Seems the wife wants half of everything, even my shoes
She says we have no future
It's not the first time we've hit a dead-end
She says she's happy now that she's run off with my best friend
I... expected so much more
Wake me up; this nightmare's getting very old
I... have taken all I can endure
Only one thing left to make me better than
Better Than Before
Just pull the trigger and the problems go away
Close your eyes and say goodbye to all the pain
Steady your hand; take a deep breath, one last breath
Let all the feelings go and start a new past...
All is quiet now
The thunderclap, then nothing at all
Maybe I can find
Find a way to lose all sense of time... in time
The answer's in the space between
From lives we live inside the seams
It's the ebb and flow of most extremes
That echo like voices from our childhood dreams
But in a fleeting moment,
We get caught up in the rat race
And forget just what it means to live!
I... have found
The meaning of it all, and it has saved me from this fall, so
I... have got to wake up and try
To do better than...
Better Than Before
Late for work again today
My alarm clock ran away
Happy Tuesday, Mr. Man
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Mark's Comment: |
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This one is the first major work that Josh brought to the table; so of course it simply HAD to be like 46 minutes long! (Actually, it clocks in closer to 12.)
I really like the wry cynicism behind the lyrics; though they're intentionally a bit over the top (not all the way to "camp," but you can almost see it from here!) they get the point across well - our hero is seriously at the end of his rope. I think that the potential for corny-ness or naïveté in a concept like "I want to be better than I was before" is tempered well by the exaggerated absurdity of the main character's situation.
As for the music, this is actually one we've been playing with from the very beginning. I remember Josh having bits and pieces of this one quite early on, well before we started officially working together, and I recall offering suggestions and thoughts on an early draft of the instrumentals. He later brought it officially into the fold as a Din Within song.
I'm really happy with the results; although the parts can be somewhat disparate if listened to separately, they all seem to flow together well in context. I don't think it goes TOO far over the top instrumentally, though we clearly had some fun with it! And vocally, the harmonies were fun - especially the cascading harmonies in the big ending... Josh was skeptical at first with some of the chord forms but came around after a few listens.
Last point - listen for my favorite part: the vocal line for "in a fleeting moment." Schwing! ;)
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Josh's Comment: |
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I brought in a large portion of the raw material before Mark even heard any of it... probably a good six or seven minutes of music that I had been sitting on; a bunch of disjointed riffs at the time. Lyrics were sparse at this point; I had a few lines that I liked the melody of, but nothing was concrete and I certainly didn't have a set lyrical concept.
The music was chugging along for a good few minutes when I came to a point in the song where I knew that I wanted a breakdown of some sort. It needed a release to take it in a new direction. I kept coming across an acoustic fingerpicking riff I had written a few months earlier. I put it into the computer and played the transition through a bunch of times. I kept singing the lines, "All is quiet now; the thunderclap, then nothing at all." I don't know where those words came from at all. For some reason I really liked the contrast of singing about a thunderclap during a very quiet moment in the song. From there, images started to come in very quickly, and a whole bunch of lyrical ideas came pouring out. I kept picturing some middle-of-the-road Everyman who's having a mundane, crappy, generic life. One day everything catches up with him, and he goes over the edge. Although it wasn't the inspiration, I kept thinking about the movie Falling Down as similar ground to what the character in the song was going through.
I went to Mark for help with the lyrics while we were still trying to finish the music. He felt that since I had the basic idea for the lyrics and came up with a lot of the music to start things off, I should flush out as much of the lyrics as I could on my own. That's part of our writing arrangement. I don't consider myself a strong lyricist at all, and I tend to write in a more literal way than I would sometimes like. Mark, on the other hand, is awesome at coming up with metaphors and allusions; something I wanted to get better at (better than before, certainly. Sorry, I had to say it!). We worked together on exactly what we wanted to say, and after we had the outline we started working on individual lines. This was very painstaking for me, because the words didn't come easy. They may not seem like much when you read them or hear them sung, but believe me it was a bit torturous. Mark was patient, and didn't hand-hold me too much, which I appreciate.
I had the idea for a classical guitar solo. Something about the sound of a nylon-string guitar just clicked with me. I could think of no better person to get to play the solo than my guitar teacher and good friend Scott McGill. As expected, he nailed the solo perfectly in just a few minutes. The guy just flat-out rocks!
There came a point in the writing of the music where the song could have easily ended in a few different places. The problem was that I kept coming up with cool riffs to keep the song going, and Mark kept on coming up with awesome ways to enhance the raw stuff I brought in. My raw material fueled Mark's creativity, and his work on the song ended up fueling my creativity all over again, so it was a perpetual cycle that took over 11 minutes of music to finally quell. I realized long ago not to fight it; if the song needs to keep going, then by all means it should keep going. Mark found it amusing that I kept adding parts, but overall I think he's happy with it. |
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