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Ever wanted to find out what inspired a particular song?
Was it based on personal experience or simply passive observation? What happened in the recording studio or on stage to make one song sound different from the rest? These are just some of the question bands and musicians attempt to answer in Line 'em Up - the newest page of The Power Of Metal.Dk. This is where your favourite bands comment on their albums, track by track, because as someone once said, “Ideas are the building blocks of ideas”. Enjoy! | ||||||||||||
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But could you please start off by introducing the readers to The 11th Hour? The 11th Hour is a doom metal project (well, I should be saying band now because it grew into something much bigger over the years) I started in 2008 together with my Swedish friend Rogga Johansson. In 2009 we released the first album Burden of Grief on Napalm Records, and the band made its live debut the same year at the Dutch Doom Days. Nowadays the band consists of:
I (Ed Warby) myself sing and play guitar, on the new album I did everything except for the growls which were done by Pim. And now onto “Lacrima Mortis”… track-by-track, what inspired you, what topics are you dealing with, what do you want to express with this song etc. We All Die Alone As soon as I wrote this I knew it would be the opening song, and it was absolutely devised this way with a grand sweeping intro and trade-off vocal lines. The clean vocals portray a dying person who just wants the people around him to let him go, Pim’s growls represent the darker emotions and fears, saying no matter how many people you have to comfort you or how much faith you have, you’re going to die alone. It ends with a long instrumental part with lots of duelling guitars. | |||||||||||||
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Rain On Me This one tells the story of someone whose loved one committed suicide, and he feels guilty for not being able to save her. In his mind she burns in hell and so he makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to salvage her soul. Musically it’s the heaviest song I’ve done so far, it’s tuned a full step lower than the other songs and the riffs are so heavy I had a sore shoulder for days after recording the final guitar tracks. | |||||||||||||
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The Death of Life A woman loses everything when her husband dies unexpectedly, she’s not prepared for what’s coming and she ends up in an old people’s home, broke and broken. The frustration and guilt of the husband are portrayed by Pim’s brutal grunts. The song is built around a plaintive piano melody rather than a guitar riff and features what’s probably the most lyrically “romantic” bit of music at the end. | |||||||||||||
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Tears of the Bereaved This one is about a cemetery where the dead live off the tears of the living. It focuses on one particular recently bereaved girl who visits the grave each day to change the flowers, clean the stone and to weep her eyes out, much to the delight of the spirits. The first half is uncharacteristically up-tempo but it slows down to an appropriate funereal crawl halfway. | |||||||||||||
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I was inspired for this song by a movie I saw a long time ago called What Dreams May Come, it has nothing to do with the rest of the film but I really liked the idea of a man trying to find his loved one after death in the “netherworld”. My story is a bit more cynical though… It’s the slowest and most elaborate/epic song on the album, with a cool acoustic interlude. | |||||||||||||
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Nothing But Pain This is the bleakest, ugliest song on the album. In it a man dying from cancer believes the tumour is his punishment for being such a bitter man all his life and he ends up “feeding” the disease by being even more bitter. Pim takes most of the vocals in this one, I only come in halfway. I love the way Pim “dies” at the end. | |||||||||||||
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Bury Me The shortest song on the album, it’s about a man that has lead a really bad life and he’s so ashamed he wants to be buried as deep as possible in an unmarked grave. This one is also tuned down to A and features a nice guitar solo. It’s the most “romantic” song musically. | |||||||||||||
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Reinier de Vries, January 2012 | |||||||||||||
