About the Song: In the Wake of Fear

In the Wake of Fear was written in the summer of 2008. I had been sifting through some old recordings, and found this little harmonic thing that I had done at some point in that sounded a little creepy. I thought it might be a good part for a song, so I basically wrote the rest of the song around it. The main riff is probably one of the simplest things that I've written, but it's incredibly fun to play. There's a lot of "chunk" to that part, which was at least partially inspired by the "new" amp that I had bought several months before, which was a very ugly first-year Peavey 5150 with a Marshall logo glued to the front. I still use that amp-it's probably the meanest-sounding one I've ever owned, and it delivers a very satisfying "CHUNK!" when you hammer away on a palm-muted chord.

I often refer to the song "In the Wake of Fear" as "the song without a chorus", because the chorus more or less consists of yelling "IN THE WAKE OF FEAR!". Awfully fun, though. Plus, I wanted to do something that had a large dynamic swing in it. Again, just like in Defiance, Troy took the first solo during the half-time section, and I do the second solo over the verse riff. And, if you remember what I mentioned in the entry about Defiance; Chris recorded the drums for this song without any guitars, bass, or vocals. That made the quiet parts that much harder, since there is little more than some cymbal taps and whatnot. Still, it was taken care of in 2 takes.

Lyrically, it was written about the same time as Defiance. When a song doesn't have lyrics, I kind of blabber out phrases during rehearsals. That helps me set the rhythm of the lyrics and sometimes helps me get a line that gets the rest of the lyrics rolling. This was one of those situations. The line "I can't take the pressure", was what spurred on the rest of the song. It raised the question, "What pressure can't he take?" From there, I sort of imagined my way through the rest of it. I pictured some freedom fighter or refugee in a war-torn country trying to figure out how to carry on. That was kind of a neat image in a way, but certainly nothing that I could hang a lyric on. They always say "write what you know", and I have no experience being in the military, fighting in a revolution, being a refugee, or anything even remotely close to that.

What I do know about is quitting smoking. I know about the shakes, the bad moods, the weird "inverse buzz" that you have, the inability to concentrate, the incessant cough, the tingling in the extremities, and the anxiety of being in situations where you cannot smoke. The physical aspect of quitting isn't actually any worse than having a mild cold. The mental aspect is the killer, and you have to wrestle with your own mind in order to actually quit. The mental aspect is also why most people who quit later start again. So what I basically did with the lyrics to "In the Wake of Fear" is take my experience with quitting smoking and wrapped it in the imagery of some sort of person in a much more interesting situation (the aforementioned). Here's how it goes:

I see an image of the world, a faded picture of a better life from before the dawn of evil days.
All these images I see, appear to me through tired and restless eyes; but I can see through the lies.

A thousand nights fall before the break of day. Who can take it any longer, when living life this way?
I keep holding out for the better days to come. That may be after the chaos ends, and all the battles are won.

The future's undetermined. The darkness, still so near. Something new emerges, 'cause freedom lies in the wake of fear.

A million nightmares descend into my mind. But when I wake, they do not fade in the light. I can't take the pressure of fighting my way through, but if I don't I'm living life as a fool.

The future's undetermined. The darkness, still so near. Something new emerges, 'cause freedom lies in the wake of fear.

The tyrants of the human soul retain control by binding up our minds so we tell ourselves their lies.

When you think about it, any element of life that increases a person's freedom comes with a level of anxiety, because freedom almost always involves risk. When you're a kid, the freedom to ride a bike comes after the fear of falling off. The freedom of moving out of your parents' house comes after the fear of leaving home. The freedom of taking your first long car drive to a new place comes after the fear of getting lost.

Anyway, that's the story of "In the Wake of Fear".

-Travis

About the songs: 7th Seal - Conspiracies of Thieves

In March of 2007, 3/4 of Act of Defiance (Troy, Dave, and me) and drummer Bobby Schatz released an album titled "Conspiracies of Thieves". We printed up 200 copies, sold most of them, gave some away, and now they're gone. Well, they've been gone for quite a while. That being said, since Dave's return to Act of Defiance in June, we have resurrected a few of those songs.

So, I posted them for free download here:

Since I had started doing the "About the song" series for the new Act of Defiance material, I figured I might as well do the same for the 7th Seal songs that are once again available. Here's the rundown:

Veracity: Veracity was the first song on the album Conspiracies of Thieves. I wrote the music for it mostly before 7th Seal was started; around 2004. I presented it to 7th Seal some time in 2005, but original drummer Jim Detenancour was having trouble with it, so it hit the back burner until Bobby Schatz joined in 2006. It was actually part of his audition. Troy and I trade off solos throughout the song. I did the first, third, and fifth solos; he did the second, fourth, and sixth solos. The big harmony section was kind of halfway stolen from Detroit Rock City by Kiss and She Wolf by Megadeth. Lyrically, it's about a combination of two acquaintances of mine who seemed to lie almost incessantly.
"Your constant bragging makes you sound just like a fool. Nobody cares nor even believes that what you say is true."

Genocide: The music for Genocide was written early in 2005. Like Veracity, it was added when Bobby Schatz joined the band. I did the solo on this one. Lyrically, it's pretty much about the tyrannical rule of dictators, and somewhat loosely based on Saddam Hussein, although it would have worked nicely for Mummar Gaddafi.
"The prideful tyrant meets his end like every man, a withered body returning to dust."

Dusk: Dusk was also written in 2005. The music was written fairly quickly, but our original drummer thought it was boring, so it wasn't until Bobby joined that we got it learned. It was first released on a Northern Edge magazine sampler, with a fairly bad recording. The album version was a lot better, but I had some problems with the tracks that I had put together for the drummer to play along with, so he wound up doing the last part of the song in free-time with me playing along. Consequently, it speeds up at the end. I did the solo in this one as well. Lyrically, it was about an acquaintance of mine who could find the bad side of everything, and did so at every available opportunity. It's also where the title "Conspiracies of Thieves" came from. A lot of people liked this song, as I remember it.
"So many times I've seen the light, then turned and walked away. A dozen hopes are a thousand lies. Why should I stay?"

Original Sin: The music for Original Sin was mostly written in 2003. The weird phased middle part, and solo section were actually written on a Jackson Soloist played through one of those Randall module amps when Troy had recently opened for business at Broadway Guitar (2004). I do the first solo, Troy does the second solo. 7th Seal played this song at every show. When Jim was in the band, it was the only original song we did, so it got to be called "the Original". That title was tweaked into "Original Sin", partially so we wouldn't have to stray too far from the working title (trust me, that's a problem). Lyrically, it's a study of the concept of Original Sin.
"Pushed to self-deification, living for gratification, is there no amelioration 'til I reach my dying day?" It's the $25 word song.

Spitting Lies: This was also mostly written in early 2005, shortly after the death of Dimebag Darrel, although some of it dates back to 2000. The riff was sort of "Dime-esque" (at least in my mind). Troy did a great job on the solo in this tune, but he had written it on the day that we were going to record it and it wasn't under his fingers yet. That's the closest I've ever seen him to throwing one of his guitars. He eventually got it down, and it came out well. Lyrically, it's the most political song on the Conspiracies of Thieves record, basically expressing disgust at the 2-party system and the way American Politics is more like the Super Bowl than a system of governance.
"They're spitting lies with that fire in their eyes, and we believe them without thinking twice."

Out the Door: Dave wrote the intro riff and another part that became the chorus of this song. I wrote the rest of it, and while I think it's a good song, it never really quite meshed with the rest in that collection. I'm not going to blame that on Dave, because I wrote the lion's share of the song. That said, it's not a bad tune, just sort of out of place. Troy was originally going to do the solo on this, but he ran out of time to work on it. He actually only ever played the song once in his life. I did all the guitars on the recording, and we played it once live at the CD Release party. Lyrically, it's about sort of a workplace backstabbing in which I had a supervisor that quit, I was semi-promoted, did my former supervisor's job for 10 months for no extra money, and then the actual promotion was given to somebody else. So, I quit, and the person who shafted me (former boss) was let go within the year.
"I never got what I wanted, but they got the best out of me. Maybe it was what I needed; a silent kick out the door."

Seventh Seal: If Cecil B. Demille had been in a local Fargo metal band, this is the song he would have written. It was pieced together with a pile of riffs that I had written going back to 2000. I did the main solo on this one. Lyrically, it is about cults; mainly the Branch Davidians and the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (Jonestown). The middle section of this song was impossible for us to nail live...I could never hold a feedback loop together, and it just killed the momentum of the song. Still, it was pretty fun to play. It also apparently started the inadvertent trend that I guess I have where the band and a song share the same name (see the "Defiance" entry).
"He says he's Christ returned again to build his kingdom here on Earth. To show the power that he wields, he hopes to break the seventh seal."

I hope you enjoy these recordings. For me, they're kind of a fun little trip down memory lane to what I was writing when I was in my mid-late 20s. "Genocide" and "Spitting Lies" have been played at the last couple of AOD shows. "Veracity" and "Dusk" are being played in rehearsals. "Original Sin" and "Seventh Seal" are on the docket to be learned, although a condensed version of "Seventh Seal" is pretty likely.

And...in case you missed the download link: HERE YOU GO

About the Song: Defiance

Defiance was originally called "Act of Defiance". The song came first, before the band name. I wrote the music back in 2008, shortly after we disbanded 7th Seal. The intro section, with the harmony guitars, was meant to actually be a set intro (to replace "the Hellion"). It was tagged onto a few other songs before it wound up being stuck to the front end of Defiance. The rest of the song was written shortly thereafter. Interestingly enough, the demo for it was nearly 8 minutes long.

Troy, Dave, former drummer Chris Fritz and I started working on it in the fall of 2008. Massive editing cut it down to a little over 5 minutes. It lost a lot of overall length, but not a lot of content. We hacked out a verse, trimmed out a weird little fill part, and slightly adjusted the ending. The process was fairly lengthy. We'd record the song during rehearsal on a little Korg digital recorder (essentially the modern equivalent to a boombox recording), listen back, give our opinions, adjust, record another take, listen back, lather, rinse, repeat. By the time we were done, we had something that we considered to be a strong step ahead of what 7th Seal had done. It was heavier and more direct without compromising any of the musicality.

Troy took the first solo, over the "quiet" part, while I do the solo in the middle section.

Next came the lyrics. I will admit that I generally procrastinate when it comes to writing lyrics. The trouble is that I can't just sit at the kitchen table and write lyrics. For whatever reason, I need to be alone in a pretty much silent place. I wrote all of the 7th Seal lyrics in the garage. The lyrics for Defiance (and all of the other songs) were written in my basement. My main point of inspiration was a drawing from "The Far Side", where one sheep stands up in the herd and says "Wait, wait! we don't all have to be just sheep!" That inspired the middle line, which pretty much unlocked the rest of the song. It's pretty simply about the fact that all people are sheep on one level or another. Either you conform to the general social order, or you conform to some subgroup of the general social order. The old saying "birds of a feather flock together" pretty much holds true. When you choose not to conform, you simply find others who are nonconformist in the same way. So people always wind up being sheep, just perhaps sheep from a different flock.

I must do what you say, and everything must be done your way.
I must feel how you feel, no matter whether it's real.
I can't use my own voice; I have to speak through you and follow your choice.
I can't know my own mind for fear of you calling me blind.

Adrift on a sea of popular thought, knowing only ideas that you were taught.
Still, you hate those who disagree.

(Chorus) What you think, what you say, is a product of society. My opinions won't fester in silence. They are spoken in an act of defiance.

You don't listen to me. That way, you don't have to disagree.
You won't let me decide how to make up my mind.
You love the sound of your words, 'cause they're the only ones you've ever heard.
You twist the truth into lies, then say it should be despised.

Adrift on a sea of popular thought, knowing only ideas that you were taught.
Still, you hate those who disagree.

(Chorus) What you think, what you say, is a product of society. My opinions won't fester in silence. They are spoken in an act of defiance.

The hypocrisy of man is more than I understand. While the flock calls me a sheep, to the slaughterhouse they leap.

In May of 2009, we recorded the demo version that is linked here.

The recording of the 3-song demo (which also includes In the Wake of Fear and Waste Away) was done at the same time back in May-June of 2009. It difficult, as I was unable to buy the equipment needed to do it well and instead wound up paying the IRS an additional $1800. We tracked the drums at Red Star Guitar, using a 6-channel Behringer mixer, an 8-channel Samick mixer, a Yamaha 4-track tape machine, and whatever mics we could cobble together.

The main problem was that we had a combination of bad mic inputs and...well, bad mic inputs. The only things that came through the entire recording were a kick drum, snare, and one overhead. I wound up having to build tom tracks based on the little "bip, boop" that came through the overheads with some samples that Andy Sneap had made while tracking a Chimaira album. So, the drums are mono-stereo. The toms are stereo, overheads are mono. We weren't able to rig up a decent monitoring system, so Chris had tracked everything from memory--no click, no guitars, no vocals, no bass. That was pretty impressive.

Dave recorded his bass direct at my house, and that was probably the only part of recording that actually went as planned. He plugged in, played the parts, and went home.

Troy and I recorded the guitars in my garage on the coldest June day in memory. We sat out there with cold hands and cold guitars, since we didn't know when we'd be able to get back to tracking rhythms. We did solos on a different day in the house, using an amp sim for the guitar sounds.

I recorded the vocals in the guest room in my house while my wife and son were at her parent's house for a few hours. When I sing this stuff, it's generally really loud...loud enough so that I don't really feel terribly comfortable tracking when anybody is in the house or right outside the house. In this case, I held back a bit because the neighbors were having a backyard barbeque. I figured they didn't need to hear me bellowing away at the top of my lungs in the guest room of my house.

Finally, it turned out that my speakers were possibly the least accurate speakers ever made. Everything sounded terribly muddy when I played sample disks in my wife's Pontiac (my unofficial monitoring system). So, I developed the mix/burn/drive system (mix the song, burn the disk, drive around listening to it). After all of that, the most jerry-rigged recording in the world actually sounds okay.

So, the song "Act of Defiance" made it on whatever the local rock radio "local band" shows were back in 2009. The band's working name at that point was "Omega Zero". At some point during 2010, when Dave was living in Bismarck and Jeff Engebretson was playing bass for us, he (Jeff) had the idea that we should just use the name "Act of Defiance". Seemed like a good idea, and it stuck. The song was changed to "Defiance", simply because I didn't want to pull another "7th Seal", in which we had a song and the band called the same thing.

And that's the story of "Defiance"

-Travis

Building the future

In an earlier post, I mentioned some of our plans coming up. Since we have nothing booked at the moment, and likely nothing through the holiday season, we are settling back into building a second 1-hour set.

If you have seen any of our last few shows, you've seen a band that was slightly strapped for time. Our standard set, as rehearsed, runs just a shade over one hour. Thus far, doing openings, we've been able to play the whole set one time. So, the time has come to build up a second set and start shooting for some headlining shows. Set construction is always an interesting process. When you're just getting running as a band, you're trying to get enough material to make playing worthwhile. Eventually, as you get more music ready, you can start to shape the way a set flows. Get even more music ready, and you can swap songs around to your heart's content. There is plenty of material written, so the task is to just whip it into shape and see where it fits in. Pick up a couple more covers and shuffle it together.

Another thing that will be happening, hopefully sooner rather than later, will be the creation of completed demos for some of the other new songs. We have been playing the 3 songs from the AOD '09 demo (Defiance, In the Wake of Fear, and Waste Away) and 3 other new songs (Another Life, Perfect World, and Awake) that haven't been demoed. Maybe I'll throw a couple of "About the song" entries on this blog as we get them completed.

Sons of Poseidon at the Garage Bar

Last night, we opened for Sons of Poseidon at the Garage Bar in Moorhead. For those of you who aren't familiar with the Garage Bar; it was formerly Pistol Pete's, then some dance-type place that got closed down approximately 17 minutes after it opened, then empty for a couple of years, and now "The Garage". It has had quite a bit of work done inside. The stage was rebuilt, a good-sized PA and excellent lighting rig were installed, the bathrooms were remodeled, and I think the bar on the lower level is new (I could be wrong on that). It's a really nice place.

We played a slightly abbreviated set, which consisted of the new tunes "Awake", "Defiance", "In the Wake of Fear", "Another Life", "Waste Away"; the 7th Seal songs "Genocide" and "Spitting Lies"; and a cover of "Children of the Sea". Overall, it went pretty well. People seem to be getting more familiar with the newest material, much of which hasn't been properly recorded at all, so that's good. It's time for us to get a few more things demoed and available for people to hear, as well as getting a second set of material finished.

Wings of the Fallen played well. I'm not very familiar with their material since I had only seen them once before, several months ago. That said, I remembered at least a couple of their tunes from having heard them once, so they must be doing something right. Nice guys, good players.

SOP was SOP. Sure, they gave the disclaimer that they really hadn't rehearsed, but any errors weren't evident to me in the crowd. The songs sounded really tight. As I mentioned in the previous entry, 7th Seal (which consisted of Troy, Dave, me, and a couple of drummers) played with SOP a lot in the 2005-2006 time frame. We always had fun opening for them. In fact, I think that some of the most fun I've had playing music was opening for SOP. Great players, and a great group of guys.

Been a long time...

I guess I nearly forgot about this blog since the first post last summer. Many changes have happened since July of 2010. For starters, our entire rhythm section has changed. We are happy to have Jon Ryan on drums, and to have Dave Stensland back on bass guitar after a year's hiatus. We've played several shows since that time; May at Rick's with Megadeaf, August at the Mainline with the Bulletboys and Alter Ego, and in September at the Garage with Cage and Iron Finger. After a very long haul of rehearsal spot problems, we now have an actual rehearsal space. This has allowed us to get a lot more work done in a much shorter period of time.

So, what do we have coming up?

S.O.P: On November 4th at the Garage in Moorhead, we are opening for the Sons of Poseidon reunion. We've been looking forward to this, because Troy, Dave, and I opened for SOP a lot back in the days of the band 7th Seal. Speaking of 7th Seal, we have a little over half of the 7th Seal album relearned and somewhat revitalized. We intend to have 6 of the 7 songs ready to rotate in and out of our sets.

New Songs: We are picking through the material that I have written or am in the process of writing, looking to have another half dozen or so new originals ready to go early in 2012 (some earlier, most likely).

Web Site: We are working on a new web site. Well, we are working on a web site. "New" implies that we have an old web site. We'll keep you posted for when it's up, at www.actofdefiance.net.

New Demos: We have started work on demoing new songs in order to reflect our actual current lineup, and to get more decently listenable material out there for people to hear. We are commencing with the song "Awake", which for whatever reason we didn't demo back in 2009 when we did "Defiance", "In the Wake of Fear", and "Waste Away."

The demos also act as our "pre-production" (sort of) for the full-length that I've talked about for 2 years and haven't gotten anywhere near done. The demo process is rather time consuming, but at the end of it you have a good idea of whether your arrangement ideas are decent or just lousy. There's something nice about being able to hear a fully fleshed-out version of the song, then being able to listen back a couple of months later and go "oh, we really should change this or that".

That's more or less what we've been up to. We'd like to thank our friends, fans, other bands, promoters, and the people who have booked us for supporting us as we get things up and running.