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
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