Maple Dye, "Teaser of Hell"









This Maple Dye song, as the previous one and some of the others that will follow, was recorded in 2013, short after finishing the first Black Sheep Riot album. The effort that album took of me was tremendous -although in exchange, I learned a lot from the experience too-. After such intensity, I entered in a period in which I just wanted to "see countries", to move quickly and carelessly, so I recorded song after song out of my catalogue, heedlessly, doing only "the easy parts", still dazzled with the novelty of the things you could easily pull out with a DAW. Some of those recordings, as time has shown, are worth completing and putting out.

This one was composed 3 years before the recording sessions took place. Its theme is those flashbacks of embarrassing moments that we all get sometimes, about stuff that is generally very far in the past and we can't do anything about, and yet it comes back again and again to torments us. A good remedy I've found for them is treating them as a biographic game of Jeopardy. The moment one of them comes, and I notice, I say aloud "1993!", "2009!", "1987!"... whatever the year more or less I guesstimate it was. When I do that, they flake out very quickly.

Different schools of thought and spirituality have different names for these flashbacks. Conventional medicine connects them to our brain stem or "lizard brain". Buddhism calls them "the beast who lives in a cave, travels alone and travels far", if I remember correctly. Eckhart Tolle would call them the inner voice or Pain Body. NLP defines them more or less like "pain stored in a holographic representation of our body"... In a more poetic vein, my song compares them to teasers (as in movie teasers: those 5" ads that you get in movie theaters  perhaps a few months before the real ads: "Get ready, Spiderman returns..." - quick logo - ok, done.) In this case, these are teasers where you get a "premiere" of... what will hell be like. :)

For the vocals I thought from the first moment in a delivery a la David Bowie, at least how I understand his style. What I most admire of his singing is the unique way in which he manages to be at the same time theatrical, flamboyant (a lot of people would say over the top), and yet at the same time you always have a feeling that he is dead serious. It was a fun exercise imitating his style, even though there are other aspects in his worldview of music that I don't share so much...

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