THE LEGEND OF THE FALL
Back story:
Anyone who has known me for any length of time most likely knows that I am staunchly opposed to the practice of putting genetically modified food into the mainstream food supply without the consumer's knowledge. I'm so passionate about it, at the advice of a friend, I started a Facebook page called "Don't Put That In Your Mouth" where I had a place to channel my righteous anger over the situation. [I've not been nearly as attentive to that page since the Year of the Groove has started simply due to limited time, but my heart is still very much in this topic.]
I'm not only completely anti GMO in my own house [as much as I can possibly be], and not only do I have a Facebook page dedicated to helping people learn how to shop and why avoid GMOs, I also have shown up to multiple March Against Monsanto rallies to be counted. In fact, I created a page with several little fliers that could be cut apart and taped to organic Halloween candy, letting people know some resources to learn more about how much genetically modified food we consume unawares. I also worked the GMO information booth at the county fair. So… yeah, I'm serious about this issue.
I'll make a deal with you. If I refrain from going into a long educational stretch about GMOs, will you watch two documentaries? Food Inc., and Genetic Roulette. I first saw Food Inc. and was devastated. That kicked me into gear with purchasing meat, dairy, and eggs that were not treated with hormones. Then I spent the next couple of years reading more and more articles about GMOs and the terrible health correlations. So when I finally came across the documentary Genetic Roulette, I had a pretty decent understanding of the situation. Had I not read so many articles and studies before seeing that documentary, I would have completely written it off as fear mongering. However, the unfortunate truth was that there was not one single piece of information in that documentary that I had not come across at least once, if not numerous times, from other sources. So… it simply galvanized my convictions and flipped the switch to zero tolerance for once and for all.
The first thing I did was go through the kitchen and get rid of all of the less obvious sources of GMOs I hadn't yet targeted like condiments and treats. The second thing I did was go and buy a LOT of organic candy and treats. Why? Because it's easy to switch to organic carrots and milk, but when your child is asking for a treat while you're out driving around, it's tempting to pull into Sonic for a chocolate milk shake and since about 96% of the sugar in the USA is GMO [among other things], I needed to always have something in my purse to avoid those situations.
"What on earth does this have to do with the song???" the confused first time reader is asking to themselves. I'll get to that.
Being the mom and wife, it has fallen on me to acquire and prepare the food we eat in our house. I do not enjoy this mantle. I take it on as an act of love for my family, but I am NOT the type who gets excited about trying out new recipes or adding garnish to all of my meticulously prepared Thanksgiving dishes. I resent being in charge of holiday meals to be totally honest. I didn't get to vote in this… just because I have ovaries why must I be in charge of holiday cooking? This doesn't feel like a holiday! But that's getting off topic.
The fact is, though, that I tend to be a perfectionist and overachiever, so if I'm going to be in charge of something, I'm going to do as well as I can. So it's that part of my personality that has wired me to be so committed to eliminating toxic food ingredients from my family's meals. [Also, I hate seeing people I love be sick. ] And with this personality trait, the burden of keeping my family from consuming GMOs comes a lot of EMOTION, as does learning more and more about what's happening in the food industry. First there's the RAGE over the INJUSTICE! The CORRUPTION!! The LIES!!! The GREEEEEED!!!! Then comes the DETERMINATION which leads to throwing things in the trash. And then once a person ventures to the grocery store to try a non-GMO approach to shopping, they quickly feel the OVERWHELMING HELPLESSNESS of not being able to know for SURE exactly where the GMOs are hiding. [Because I started this process before the wonderful "Non GMO Project" started verifying food items.]
There were many many many times I slowly pushed the shopping cart around the aisles of the grocery store as I was trying to find a new way to shop with such a weight on me, feeling lost and angry, feeling like the grocery store was a hostile environment because these ingredients are HIDDEN in our food… [Some of you at this point are thinking "Man, this chick's a complete nut job", right? Just watch those documentaries and read some books on the subject and you will start to feel the same.] The emotion was so palpable, I needed a creative way to process and express how serious this felt. And I believe this is an extremely serious issue. If the research data is correct, and if the dozens of health conditions that have been correlated with the emergence of GMOs and increased use of herbicides are actually caused by the consumption of these foods… the implications are astronomical.
Songwriting:
So… being a songwriter, I often process my life experiences through song. I hardly EVER sit and say "I'm going to write a song now" and then proceed to write a song, unless I'm writing something specific for a client and I need to get it done fast or assimilate certain things into the lyric. For our WGC releases, if I'm not writing lyrics and melody over a track Kurt started, I usually hear a song up to 100 times in my head as I go about my life before I have the luxury of sitting down to try to hammer out my ideas. I've had songs completely finished in my head before I ever sit at an instrument. I may sit with a sheet of paper and work out the lyrics, but the music is all in my head and I'm in complete silence as I work. That was what happened with "The Legend of the Fall".
With our new releases in the Year of the Groove, several of the songs [many not yet released] were songs that pretty much wrote themselves in my head. Not to say it was effortless, but they persisted. The "muse" wouldn't let me be, I would try to have conversation with people and in between sentences the song kept looping in my head. It wouldn't allow me to not write it. If I hadn't eventually written the song, I might have gone a bit nuts. I always feel better about songs that come about that way because there's something about them that feels intuitive and right.
The first part of "The Legend of the Fall" that came to me was the song title and the chorus melody and lyric of "something's going under on the inside, (something something something about ) THE WALL…" The melody for this song came into my head quite organically. Actually… I believe the verse and the transitional bridge [pre chorus] came into my head without me needing to intentionally compose any of it. I just modified it later a bit when I got my lyric in place.
One interesting thing about the structure of this song is that what is often called the "Pre-chorus", which is the section after the verse and before the chorus, also comes AFTER the chorus. I've actually never known of another song that does that, and I didn't even really think about it, it just naturally wanted to happen. So in this particular case, the term "transitional bridge" is more appropriate since it's both pre and post chorus. The song's structure is verse, TB, chorus, TB, verse, TB, chorus, TB, chorus, TB. The TB lyric changes ever so slightly before and after the chorus and the very last TB is the most urgent.
Clearly this song's lyric is metaphorical. As I crafted the lyric, I had a mental picture of something fundamentally going wrong with nature because the enemy has altered the fabric of life, which leads to a very rudimentary uprising of the people. In my mind, the people have no sophisticated weapons, and the enemy is locked up tight behind an impenetrable fortress, and while the people are trying to break through unsuccessfully, the enemies behind the wall are actually imploding in their own corruption, yet the people outside can't tell because of the wall.
Each time the chorus comes, the words change to carry the story forward.
There’s a panic in the willow
Something isn’t right
A suicidal hunger
That puts the birds to flight
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody help us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Lies and secrets thrive behind the wall
Silver tongues will carve their words to justify
The legend of the fall
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody save us now
They crushed the hand that feeds us
With synergistic greed
Impunity, collusion, and control
Is corrupting every seed
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody help us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Stones and arrows can’t break through the wall
The lunatic denies the call to rectify
The legend of the fall
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody save us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Hell and fury burn behind the wall
Those who find the fountain come to realize
The legend of the fall
Only God can stop it now
God save us now
I actually worked quite a bit on this lyric, fine tuning it. Here are some images of what I wrote on paper. You can see some of the lyrics that came from my "flow and don't overthink it just write it down" phase of writing. And you can see other options I was using as place holders until I came up with my final ideas. And you can see how I upgraded words here and there, such as from "smoke and fire" I upgraded to "hell and fury". More impact.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SCROLL THROUGH THE GALLERY OF THE DIFFERENT DRAFTS.
CLICK ON THE IMAGE ABOVE TO SCROLL THROUGH THE GALLERY OF THE DIFFERENT DRAFTS.
And here is the earliest draft from my computer.
There’s a panic in the willow
Something isn’t right
A suicidal hunger
That puts the birds to flight
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody help us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Lies and secrets thrive behind the wall
Silver tongues will form their words to justify
The legend of the fall
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody help us now
They crushed the hand that feeds us
Named their wants as needs
Entitlement devoured self control
Corrupting every seed
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody help us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Stones and arrows can’t break through the wall
The lunatic denies the call to rectify
The legend of the fall
Is there anyone to stop it now
Can anybody save us now
Something’s going under on the inside
Hell and fury burn behind the wall
Those who find the fountain come to realize
The legend of the fall
Only God can stop it now
God save us now
The first chorus in this draft uses the verb silver tongues will "form" which I switched later to "carve" which is a stronger verb and seems more sinister and calculated. The second verse, the two middle lines are completely different. I cut that second line and reworked it because the word "greed" seemed important to include. And the third line, I still like the imagery of that, but for some reason in my gut, I felt that the meaning wasn't as strong or on point from the story unfolding in my mind, so I changed it to "impunity, collusion and control" which had more character. I do miss the entitlement reference, but it's one of the spoils of editing. Sometimes you just can't use all your good ideas.
Now… when writing a lyric that contains $5 words like "synergistic", "impunity" and "collusion", there's going to be a certain gravity to the emotion of the song. This is in drastic contrast to "Freak the Beat" and "Kiss Me Slow". I did at times question if I was getting too thick with the verbiage, but in the end, I decided that as long as my level of poetic imagery and vocabulary word choices were consistent through the song, it would be alright. Impunity and collusion had the meaning I wanted, so I used them even if many people may not know the exact definition.
In terms of the story development, verse one is when nature knows something is wrong, but mankind has not yet sensed it. So chorus one is when the enemy is still under the radar and going strong. The second verse "they crushed the hand that feeds us" talks not so covertly about what has happened to so many farmers, an important part of our society. It's a play off the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" saying, but I took it a bit further with "crushed", because that is what has happened to so many farmers in reality. Back to the metaphor. The second chorus is after the people have realized what's happened and they try to combat the enemy and put a stop to the corruption to no avail because they simply are not equipped. And the third chorus depicts things imploding behind the wall and mankind becoming more aware of the situation. Obviously the "fountain" refers to knowledge of those who understand what the enemy has truly done, and how even the enemy cannot reverse what they have put into play. And clearly the last transitional bridge emphasizes the magnitude of the damage, as it states that "only God can stop it now. God save us now".
I hate that I even debated whether or not I should have talked about God in the end. It's how I personally feel, but that automatically loses some people. I flat out had an anti-GMO activist refuse to share the song on his page because he said it talked about God too much. I mean… OK… if you don't want ANY reference to God, that's your business, but it only comes in at the very end, so I guess ANY in his opinion is "too much". But you know what? This is my song. I can say what I damn well please and it's how I feel. So I talk about God in the end. Because in the words of Bobby Brown, "that's my prerogative." And I'm not about to water this down just so I don't offend some people. What am I doing this for if I don't stay true to my own convictions?
NERDS ONLY for this next part. If you don't want to get into scale degrees, skip down to "production."
Harmonically, this song is pretty simple. The verse and chorus primarily go between the 1 chord and the b6 [flat six] chord. In order to not have the verse and chorus be harmonically identical, I kept the b6 chord in first inversion with the tonic, or the 1st scale degree which is the third of the b6 chord, in the bass through the verse. This made it more of a pedal tone, so when the b6 chord comes in there's tension. Then the transitional bridge departs from those two chords, and when we come back the them in the chorus, now they are in root position which is stronger and gives more of a sense of movement. So it's a good balance of sameness with variety.
Melodically, in the verse the words "willow" and "hunger" go to the more tense scale degrees, which emotionally supports the meaning of the lyric. This aspect of songwriting is called prosody. That word means how the lyric and melody work together. Some songs have a disconnect between the meaning of the lyric and the musical context, such as "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People. "The Legend of the Fall" has a definite connection between the meaning and the melodic context. So the verse starts on the low tonic and the first line ends on the b6 and hangs there for "willow". The second line descends back to the tonic. There's the first tension and release. Third line "suicidal hunger" rises from the low tonic up to the b7, which is even more tense. [In my default melody that came into my head, it only went to the b6 again, but I changed it to the b7 to add tension, so that was an edit.] Then the 4th line doesn't go back to the tonic, instead it ends on the b6, but this time that doesn't seem as tense because we just came off the b7 on the line before. So it's tension and slightly some release. Going from tension to release keeps a song moving forward.
Then the prechorus/TB melody contrasts the contour of the verse melody, and as the lead into the chorus it hangs out on the b3 for the last note. When the chorus comes in, we start on that same b3 scale degree but it's up an octave. The general shape of the lines in the chorus are descending from the b3, and the word "wall" lands on the 4, but all the other lines go to the tonic at the end. So the chorus is more melodically resolved, however that doesn't last long because then we're right into the transitional bridge and it ends us on the b3 again going back into the verse.
Of course all of this melodic analysis is way after the fact, and none of this was on my mind when I wrote it. I wouldn't even be thinking about this at this point if I didn't teach composition. It's good sometimes to analyze things so when you DO need to be more craft driven due to lack of organic inspiration, you know what to do.
Production:
In 2013, I read about an event called the Monsanto Video Revolt. It was going to happen in 2 weeks from when I learned about it. I had let Kurt hear the piano vocal demo I'd made of the song quite a while before, but since he is usually just trying to keep the bills paid, the money work always nudges the WGC work off the roster and many songs are left in the dreaded quagmire of being in my brain or only living in one of my rough demos, never to be fully produced. I saw this as my chance to give this song a deadline and I pitched Kurt on the idea of FINISHING THE SONG so we could take part in this video revolt. Fortunately, he went for it and started actually producing it.
My first vision for the production was to use a mellotron and have some slight detuning to make it seem more precarious and tragic. But then the idea of a dubstep bassline occurred to me and I realized the two might not exactly work together, so we quickly abandoned the mellotron idea and I asked Kurt to pleeeease learn how to do a dubstep bassline, as up to then we'd never attempted one. In his usual gear geek fashion, he looked up YouTube videos and read blog posts about how to make a dubstep bassline, and voila… the next thing I knew he had done it. That's why I call him "wizz". Over the next couple of weeks, we finished the track, without much refinement due to the deadline, I sang the vocal even though I was recovering from a chest bug, and we mixed it and did our own mastering. This is the version of the song that was leaked to our mailing list members a year before the Year of the Groove version was released. For those who did download it, they will definitely notice some obvious changes to the production in the official release.
Once we decided we were going to properly release the song for the Year of the Groove, we knew we needed to refine it a bit more. Before I knew it, Kurt had completely reworked the drum pattern underneath, which caught me by surprise. It took me a couple of days to get used to the drums not being square on the beats like the first rushed version of the song. I was never quite happy with the sounds used for the instrumental solo section and also the two note instrumental melody that happens each time in the transitional bridge. That two note melody was a part of the song from the beginning when I wrote it. If you take that out of the song, to me, it's not the same song. Even though it's only two notes, it's important. Just like the two notes you hear each time before "Tainted Love" [by Soft Cell]. It's just part of the song. When I was imagining the mellotron version of the song [which has never existed anywhere outside of my brain], those two notes were going to be strings, sliding from the top note down to the other note. But since we had instead gone dubstep on this track, I wanted something with a clear attack and no slide. Once I knew we had a second chance, I thought I wasn't going to "settle" for sounds I didn't love. And then came the task of finding the sound that would play that two note instrumental part.
This wasn't a job Kurt could do. There were FAR too many sounds to have to audition. So there were three different times, I sat by myself and scrolled through sounds in omnisphere and other software synths looking for JUST the right sound. I kept duplicating the track and trying different combinations of sounds. At one point, I had 4 sounds layered, and bounced that version out and Kurt immediately gave it a thumbs down. And when I listened to it again, I agreed it wasn't right. Finally the deadline was drawing near and we HAD to finish to get the song to mastering.
Indecision is a producer's worst enemy.
I finally told Kurt to feel free to work with the dozen different duplicates of that track, each with a different sound assigned, and decide what we'd go with. He landed on a combination of 2 or 3, I don't remember, and he basically said "this is fine, it's going to work" and so pragmatically, I agreed it was time to just let it be. I'm sure this will never matter to anyone else ever. Time to move on and get the song mastered and out the door.
Publicity:
After the press release about this song came out, in a matter of a couple of days, we were contacted by a woman with the Oregon Right to Know organization about headlining at their fundraising event in Portland before a big vote about labeling GMOs in Oregon. I was so sorry to have to say that there was no way we could do that. Although we couldn't give a live performance, I still wanted to use my talents more actively to further this message. We agreed to film a video for them and run some graphic ads through our social profiles.
As an artist, there is a great deal of gratification to simply finishing a song. Period. There's another happy satisfaction to getting a good recording of it finished. YES! And then when you can finally share that song with others and get some nice feedback, that feels even better. But none of that is nearly as good as having your song become a part of something bigger, especially when it's something you are truly passionate about.
So, the fact that I wrote a song that has led to us being a part of an official anti GMO campaign is really a great feeling.
Over all, I'm really happy with this song. I'm happy with the lyric, and with the musical context of the lyric. I'm happy with the production of it. And I'm elated that it has found some legs and become a part of something larger.
And if you've read this whole thing, you're a champ. Thank you.
