Black Sheep Riot, "Empty Roads"





The I Ching book is my favorite fortune-telling resource, I come to it every now and then for guidance, and there is a figure that appears very often, and with a particular intensity: the wanderer.

"He who has few friends is the wanderer". "The wanderer has no home, the road is his home". "The wanderer must be careful to only stop around good people"...

I'm afraid my destiny has a lot to do with this description, and I wrote this song around that concept, together with Edgar Allan Poe's "All I loved I loved alone": the "roads" I'm speaking of are not noisy crowded highways, but the roads for those who like to walk at their own pace and sightsee. Many of the things I love are not popular anymore, and it saddens me to think that the moment I'm not there to love them, no one else will do.

A ternary tempo plus a medieval scale is always an unbeatable combination for an intimate ballad of this kind, as you can see in many illustrious predecessors, which undoubtedly influence the song: Black Sabbath ("Scarlet Pimpernel", "Solitude", "Planet Caravan"...), Metallica ("Nothing else matters"), and many others that escape my memory right now...

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