Part 1
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The Digression Theory Pt. 1 is the first part of an almost 2 hour, double-disc concept album of long-form, progressive metal songs I conceived the summer before my senior year of high school. After being obsessed with bands like Haken, Coheed and Cambria, The Dear Hunter, Porcupine Tree, and too many more to name, I decided that I wanted to give writing a concept album a go.
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Part 2
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After writing and writing and writing for almost the entirety of the summer of 2017, I finally felt like I had enough music to release something. After weeks of recording, and producing, I sent it over to Neel Madan to have it mixed and mastered. Looking back at the 17 year old me, after having learned alot about writing and producing I am really happy with how these albums came out.....
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Concept Album?
Yup you heard that right! It's a Concept Album.
As a kid I absolutely loved stories and reading as a whole, I would fly through books at an furious pace and just kept on going. I still to this day have a love for good stories and world building, even as I find myself reading less and less as the years pass. When I started writing these songs, they were almost thru-composed in nature making them feel like I was listening to a book. Books don’t repeat chapters just because they got you hooked on a story line, so why should songs? As I completed the music to these songs and began writing lyrics, I found myself telling stories in the lyrics, almost following the forms (or lack-thereof) in the songs. Each song on this album has a story tied to it, and all these stories tie together to create a more grandiose, overall theme.
Part 1
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The Digression Theory Pt. 1 Is started and ended by The Epilogue and The Interlude, two tracks I designed and composed to act as almost auditory bookends. The forms of which are almost slightly altered retrogrades of one another, really hammering in a sense of beginning and end to part 1. To me, it makes it feel like how a good hardcover book feels when you make your way from front to back. The meat and potatoes of the album start at track #2: Line. This song was written like a sad breakup song, except its written from the perspective of a friend of both halves of the couple, trying not to cross the line between either of them in fear of losing both rather than just one. |
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Track #3: Converge is about a dream I once had. I can never remember the specifics about my dreams usually, but this one I was able to jot down and gain inspiration lyrically. To be perfectly frank, I have no idea what this song is about, which makes it all the more fun in my opinion.
Half the point of a story is to let the one reading it come to their own conclusions.
Half the point of a story is to let the one reading it come to their own conclusions.
Infinity, Track #4, takes a more science fiction approach from my love of stories like Ender's Game and all things sci-fi. It's a story about some spaceship prisoners being 'voluntold' they have to do some recon of an unknown entity in space, and if they complete the mission, they're sent home free. The prisoners happily oblige, wanting to be back home, so they set a course for their target. in teams of 2 in smaller ships, they approach the target only to discover it is a miniature singularity, and before they could figure out what it was, they were already beyond the event horizon. Our two nameless protagonists make a promise to keep each other safe knowing full well that there is no hope. They enter the singularity and for a brief second, experience absolute nothingness until they're ripped away come out the other side and crash land on a planet. After collecting their bearings, they discover that what they've landed on looks like a planet, but is on the inside of a giant sphere and somehow fully lit, looking like a normal forest. (I wish I could draw the image in my head for what this looks like, but sadly my skills end at music. Think that one scene from Inception meets the Halo rings). Not having any tools, equipment, or knowledge of where they are, our protagonists resign themselves to their fate.
Synapse, track #5 and the last substantial track of part 1, is similarly sci-fi, but even more of a thought experiment than Infinity. This song explores the idea I had about a person with 3 personalities. The real them, and the other two, which are constructs of the differing hemispheres of their brain. One personality has the naive, creative nature of the right hemisphere, and the other has the cold, calculating, and logical nature of the left. I then had the thought of what a person with these personalities would do in the end of the world scenario, and thought about how they'd survive among the beautiful chaos that is an apocalypse.
Writing this album helped get years of locked up creativity out and into the world, and in about 7 years or so, once its the 10 year anniversary, I plan to re-record it to give it the production I feel these songs deserve.
Synapse, track #5 and the last substantial track of part 1, is similarly sci-fi, but even more of a thought experiment than Infinity. This song explores the idea I had about a person with 3 personalities. The real them, and the other two, which are constructs of the differing hemispheres of their brain. One personality has the naive, creative nature of the right hemisphere, and the other has the cold, calculating, and logical nature of the left. I then had the thought of what a person with these personalities would do in the end of the world scenario, and thought about how they'd survive among the beautiful chaos that is an apocalypse.
Writing this album helped get years of locked up creativity out and into the world, and in about 7 years or so, once its the 10 year anniversary, I plan to re-record it to give it the production I feel these songs deserve.
Part 2
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where the story plays out, using the ideaThe Digression Theory Pt. 2 Is a combination of 2 more stories and 2 explanatory pieces. It begins with track #1: Human, featuring Kilian Duarte, an incredible bassist I met at the NAMM convention some years back. This song explores concept of A.I. and more specifically, a robot not knowing that they're artificial. (Think the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica, only I wrote this song way before I ever watched the show). At the time I thought it was an interesting concept, so the song sort of explores the stages of grief of a robot discovering that it's not human.
Volume and The Digression Theory, tracks 2 and 3, are tracks that talk about the concept album as a whole, and bring up the overall theme. These songs discuss the idea that when a story is created, a kind of alternate universe is |
created that with the infinite expansion of the universe, there are infinite possibilities. Moreover, by 'observing' a story (think Schrödinger's cat), you sort of 'will' that story into existence and give It a place In the universe, and by writing a story, you become an unknowing god of a world you've created. Branching farther into that train of thought, what's to say that our entire existence isn't a result of this arguably made-up phenomenon. I just think all of this is very interesting to think about, so I wrote songs about it.
Lastly, we arrive at the final track, almost operatic in nature, Hammer and Nail. As the longest song on the album at almost 22 minutes long, Hammer and Nail feels to me as a Greek Tragedy, and is written fairly similarly to one. It takes place in this alternative version of 1600's europe with an almost steampunk aesthetic, and it follows our unnamed protagonist as he follows around an acting troupe with which he has become obsessed, shadowing them to every show, watching them as they perform an amazing spectacle night after night. After a while, however, he notices something strange. The lead of the play, who dies at the end, is somehow performed by a completely different performer every single night, and then is never seen again. At first it appeared to be coincidence, but after dozens of shows, our protagonist suspects something was afoul.
After a show one day, he decides to sneak backstage after his curiosity gets the better of him, and is promptly beaten and captured by the acting troupe. He learns that the troupe is part of sacrificial, religious cult, aptly led by a man named The Apostle, who so coincidentally plays a character by the same name in the production. They venture from town to town, capturing the unsuspecting, threatening them with an acts of violence on a loved one or family member unless they participate in the play. By participating in the 'play', a ploy for a religious sacrificial ceremony, they die in the final act; only for the cycle to begin anew the next night. Resigned to his fate, our protagonist who knows every word in the play, acts out his role and prepares himself for his final act. He puts on the most incredible performance the troupe has ever seen. He knows he will be dragged behind the curtain while the audience watches his shadow slaughtered. As he begins to mount the stage for his final act, before the audience can see him, The Apostle saves him at the last moment him with a body double.
The Apostle, still malicious and venomous, but with an soft spot for talent, tells our protagonist that he may live, but only if he joins the troupe, and by doing so, assisting and capturing in 'lambs' for the slaughter. In order to save his own life, and the lives of his family, the protagonist agrees. Years pass and the protagonist has seen this cycle repeat over and over and over again, every night witnessing an innocent person laid to rest as penance for his own survival. Eventually, he can’t take it anymore and begs The Apostle to let him play the lead properly, one last time. The Apostle agrees, and to lay his sinful soul to rest, the protagonist gives up his life as penance for the terrible things he's done to stay alive all this time.
One day, I dream to be able to turn this story into a full production and auditorily and visually tell this story, but until then, I'll just keep writing.
These albums were an immense undertaking to me as a 17 year-old, but I am more than proud with how they turned out in the end.
Lastly, we arrive at the final track, almost operatic in nature, Hammer and Nail. As the longest song on the album at almost 22 minutes long, Hammer and Nail feels to me as a Greek Tragedy, and is written fairly similarly to one. It takes place in this alternative version of 1600's europe with an almost steampunk aesthetic, and it follows our unnamed protagonist as he follows around an acting troupe with which he has become obsessed, shadowing them to every show, watching them as they perform an amazing spectacle night after night. After a while, however, he notices something strange. The lead of the play, who dies at the end, is somehow performed by a completely different performer every single night, and then is never seen again. At first it appeared to be coincidence, but after dozens of shows, our protagonist suspects something was afoul.
After a show one day, he decides to sneak backstage after his curiosity gets the better of him, and is promptly beaten and captured by the acting troupe. He learns that the troupe is part of sacrificial, religious cult, aptly led by a man named The Apostle, who so coincidentally plays a character by the same name in the production. They venture from town to town, capturing the unsuspecting, threatening them with an acts of violence on a loved one or family member unless they participate in the play. By participating in the 'play', a ploy for a religious sacrificial ceremony, they die in the final act; only for the cycle to begin anew the next night. Resigned to his fate, our protagonist who knows every word in the play, acts out his role and prepares himself for his final act. He puts on the most incredible performance the troupe has ever seen. He knows he will be dragged behind the curtain while the audience watches his shadow slaughtered. As he begins to mount the stage for his final act, before the audience can see him, The Apostle saves him at the last moment him with a body double.
The Apostle, still malicious and venomous, but with an soft spot for talent, tells our protagonist that he may live, but only if he joins the troupe, and by doing so, assisting and capturing in 'lambs' for the slaughter. In order to save his own life, and the lives of his family, the protagonist agrees. Years pass and the protagonist has seen this cycle repeat over and over and over again, every night witnessing an innocent person laid to rest as penance for his own survival. Eventually, he can’t take it anymore and begs The Apostle to let him play the lead properly, one last time. The Apostle agrees, and to lay his sinful soul to rest, the protagonist gives up his life as penance for the terrible things he's done to stay alive all this time.
One day, I dream to be able to turn this story into a full production and auditorily and visually tell this story, but until then, I'll just keep writing.
These albums were an immense undertaking to me as a 17 year-old, but I am more than proud with how they turned out in the end.
