Faster = Later

The irony...oh, the unbearable irony...


Seems that our next song, the appropriately titled "Faster", is still some time away from reaching your ears, our dear listeners.


The reason for the holdup is simple: Much of what we recorded live is rubbish. Out of tune, out of beat, sounds bad, feels worse. Just plain crap.


The song is amazing, though.




Thankfully, Pekka did best of us three slobs, so we're keeping his pretty excellent drum tracks and building the song from there, top to bottom all over again. It's going to take a couple of weeks before we're there, though.


Since my recent rant extolling the virtues of live recording, I should probably be movie-quoting Jack Nicholson: "Well, don't I feel like the f*****g a*****e".




Bear with us, dear friends. We promise to make it worth your wait.


~Markus

Music to lessen/increase the guilt:

Jesu (pretty much anything they've ever recorded)

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Waste No Words - The song and how it came about

Writing music is fun? It's a total pain in the ass. Excruciating, continuous, torturous toil of putting in sweat, blood and tears for something that gives little or no rewards, until you just wish you were collecting stamps instead.

Ok, kidding. But no matter how many songs or riffs or ideas you come up with, every once in awhile you feel completely dried out. Run out of ideas. Like you're never going to write a decent song again.

It's actually quite amusing how easy it is to believe each time this happens, even though the ideas always eventually come.

* * *

After one of these long, dry spells, Waste No Words was a proverbial cork off the floodgate. I had a daily date with my guitar for weeks on end, but nothing seemed to come out of it; I discarded bad ideas as fast as I was coming up with them.

Then, one afternoon, the chorus riff just came out by itself, and I wrote the verse right after it. In less than an hour, I had the basic song structure down along with the vocal melodies. I liked it, so I brought it to the band right away.

At this point, we'd wrtitten enough together as a band to get to the meat of the song right away. It was one of our the fastest writes yet - practically all the first-time arrangements stuck.

* * *

This needs to be in color.
The awesomeness of Bolton cannot be contained in BW

One thing I really wanted to avoid was making this song into a Def Leppard ballad. The verse vocal lines are sappy enough to pour some serious sugar on an unsuspecting listener, and on top of that, I always saw this as a love song. Waste No Words had all the makings of a '80's hair band disaster.

Fortunately, one thing that always comes to rescue at times like these is our tuning policy - once the chorus kicks in, along with Jaakko's bass sounding like the Goat of Mendes farting blood on a bible camp, any traces of sap are effectively removed.

Maybe in the future, we should embrace this effeminate side of ours. Go full ballad. Become the Michael Boltons of shoegazing metal. "Can I Touch You There"?

Why the hell not, Michael. Grope away.

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Music for the unsuspecting masses:

PJ  Harvey - Let England Shake

Devin Townsend . Deadhead, Addicted (LP)

Michael Bolton - Can I Touch You There

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