Some of you have written to me wanting to know what a particular song means. One good use of this newsletter would be to tell you all what the songs mean (at least to me) as well as give some other comments about how they were written and anything else interesting. This issue will look at two very grim Fireaxe songs, "Light of Day" and "Despair".

Light of Day. This song is based around a melody and lyrics that I had been kicking around for more than a decade. There isn't much to it, having a very simple drum and rhythm guitar track and with the solos and vocal melodies being almost identical. However, the track captures the feeling of the lyrics, that of a long, lonely, and ultimately doomed quest, showing that songs don't need to be complex to be good.

The song is about life itself and taking the road less traveled. The refrain "Light of day cannot light my way, down the road I have gone" is something I have felt my whole life. The road less traveled is exactly that, less traveled. One finds very little company when one shakes loose from the bonds of conformity. Often it is a difficult struggle, you face more obstacles than most others do and are so often left up to your own devices to solve your problems. It can be rewarding, but most of the time it seems like the rewards are too few and far between. Most of the time it feels like a dark and lonely quest.

The final line of the single verse, "cutting through the endless jungle, closing in on certain death" is a grim statement about the inevitability of death. It puts the quest in perspective. In the end you will have nothing to show for your struggles. All is consumed by the reaper. The implied meaning is that the quest itself must be its own reward. This meaning applies whether you view taking the road less traveled as being a decision you made or a sentence that has been passed upon you. So far, Fireaxe has been a rewarding quest for me, enough so that I choose to proceed.

Despair. Two things made this song work well, one was the three voice harmony, the other was the switching between clean and heavily distorted guitar work. The three voice harmony goes well with the poem. The first three lines of each verse build upon a similar theme each with increasing intensity. By adding in a new voice at a higher pitch than the previous one, the intensity increase in the poem is captured. For the concluding fourth line of each verse, just a single high voice is used which drops down to capture the surrender of the writer to despair. The verses come at the listener in waves, building up and letting go, and gives the feel of the ebb and flow of the tide. This effect is strengthened by the guitar sound. After every other verse the song goes into a heavily distorted section which represents the depths of despair. The song rises out of those depths and the singing pulls the listener out again, only to return at the end of the verse.

The last line of this song is the clincher. All the instruments and other voices stop after the first three lines of the last verse and one voice remains to chant out the final line:

"And beyond the groans and grating,
of abhorrent life is waiting,
sweet oblivion culminating,
all the years of fruitless quest."

The single voice sounds desperate and alone and trails off into silence. It sounds as if the very song itself ran out of time and passed away quietly into the night.

This song was quite a challenge to pull off using a multi- track recorder with only 4 tracks. There were six instruments which needed to be captured. I ended up having to put the drums and both guitars all on a single track with the vocals on the three remaining tracks. The trouble with doing it that way is that you have to mix all the instruments together before the vocals are recorded which makes it harder to figure out where the levels should be. I made my best guess and I think it turned out rather well.

The new recording for "Despair" will not have that limitation since I am using an 8 track recorder. Another big plus for this song is the new drum machine. By using some of the features of the machine I was able to get it to sound a lot like a clock, which adds to the despair. The waves of despair wash over the listener while the ticking clock is a steady reminder that time (and life) is slowly slipping away.