Albion-Tharotia - Rescue Me
11Listen/download the Poison Skies: http://albion.bandcamp.com
The Afflicted: http://bit.ly/theafflicted
David says...
All the songs so far were written roughly in the same order that they appear on the album, but Rescue Me was the last song to be completed. You can hear its story in our audio commentary - Kjorteo was working on it independently and kept adjusting sections and lyrics as I was recording the rest of the album.
And it was an absolute boss monster to sing. I tried to make each character’s singing voice slightly distinct from the others but without putting so much effort into it as to make the whole thing laughable - for example, Edward with very clear enunciation, Girard with a slight snarl - so by my own rules I could probably have got away with making it easier on myself and singing this an octave lower, but to my ears it didn’t seem right for Celine.
Even though I can now reach a couple of notes higher than I could when I started the album, I’m still not quite at the minimum range to be considered a tenor, and this song had the longest stretches of notes near the top of my range (I think the highest notes on the album are isolated B4s, which I could just about hit on a good day). At first I sang it in snatches and put alternate lines on different tracks to create a call-and-response effect, but Kjorteo understandably didn’t think that worked for a song sung by one character. So in the end, after a lot of takes, I was finally able to get through whole verses at a time! I think it mostly works, but I’m still a bit unsure about the final elongated “free”.
I found one of the renders I did on the song when it was close to finished, and the slight but obvious differences from the final one are fascinating to listen to - you can hear it at http://teamouse.net/music/poison/rescue-me-beta-version.mp3
Kjorteo says...
Lyrically, this is the first full song whose lyrics I've ever written entirely on my own, so someone with more experience than me will have to tell me if this is how the process normally works, but... I found my biggest challenge with the lyrics to be leveling off and averaging out the peaks and valleys that came with the earlier drafts of what I'd written. I'd come up with a line that was so brilliant that I just *had* to use it, but that locked all the lines around it into restricted word choices to fit the rhyming scheme.
Musically, though the final version is very close to my original idea, there were one or two adjustments along the way. I had to change the "You built me to be strong only by your decree" part of melody after realizing the original chorus was accidentally identical to "Break Away" by Nocturnal Rites. I do feel guilty about vetoing David's call-and-response effect and making him sing entire verses like that, but... like he said, I just don't think that was the right effect for an internal monologue with one character. Also, I made him change its order in the overall track list.
I had David put Rescue Me *before* the Poison Skies title track, because it makes more sense for the story. In the novel, Rescue Me comes when Celine is torn between her father's expectations and her own desires, as the two factions of the tribe are drifting farther and farther apart. The Poison Skies title track captures the moment where the tribe disintegrates and splits in two, and everyone (including Celine) choose which side to follow. This is the culmination of Celine's character arc; she's been agonizing about having to choose between her father and herself, but in the end she gathers her courage and makes that choice. For that reason, having Rescue Me after Poison Skies felt backwards; Celine would be complaining about a problem that had already been resolved. With Rescue Me coming first, it feels more like a proper buildup to the split, one of the many issues that ultimately doom the tribe.
Overall, in contrast to David's fascination with how new and exotic this one seems compared to his work, I see Rescue Me as a rather basic "verse/chorus/verse/chorus/solo/bridge/chorus with key change" formula, mostly because it's my first song. The power of how we view our own work versus others', I suppose! Still, even there, there's a lot of room to work within even the most cookie-cutter song structures and make something that sounds unique and nice. I put David through way too much trouble bringing this song to life (dear God, figuring out that solo,) but I love how it all turned out in the end.