A very early work in progress meant as a loose style pastiche of the Nightwish track it’s named after. It doesn’t actually feel very close yet, which isn’t all that surprising, since Tuomas Holopainen’s composition style is deceptively complex. I’m not entirely certain where this one is going yet, or if I’ll even attempt to finish it in this style – I may end up taking it in a completely different direction.

Even if I don’t, it already sounds like it belongs in a ’90s JRPG, so I’ll probably lean into the No­bu­o U­e­mat­su/Ya­su­no­ri Mit­su­da/Hi­ro­ki Ki­ku­ta/Yo­ko Shi­mo­mu­ra/Mo­to­i Sa­ku­ra­ba style as much as I can. I’ve been listening to all five for over two decades; the first three in particular are such fundamental influences on me that I doubt I could write something without their influence if I tried. In the immortal words of a great Canadian philosopher: ⟨youtu.be/urBpdyFCZmo⟩ “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.⁽²⁾” A corollary of this principle is that if you try not to sound like an act, they have still influenced you.

There’s probably also some conspicuous Genesis influence on this – another fundamental influence on my songwriting that I doubt I could dispel if I tried (I’ve probably been listening to them since my literal infancy). I can’t think of a popular music composer more skilled at key modulation than Tony Banks, and perhaps only Brian Wilson is on his level.

I avoided modulation when writing music for Tempus Irae Redux, which often featured a chant drone on C as an ambient sound; thus, modulations could introduce unintended dissonance. I also haven’t used them in my Endless Sky tracks: they’re meant to be built on-the-fly based on game conditions, requiring everything to be in the same key for optimal results (I’ve settled on G minor). As a result, actually being able to change keys in a new composition for once has felt oddly liberating.

Naturally, this changes key a few times; I think I employed some variant of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” progression. Just don’t ask me to improvise over it.

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This song uses some deliberately eerie and even dissonant chord progressions, and I pretty quickly settled on effectively making the evil twin of Genesis’ “Watcher of the Skies”, just with added disco influence (despite the song also being in 7/4). The idea is to make it both as evil-sounding and as funky as possible.

The late, dearly lamented Sir Terry Pratchett had this to say:

“The phrase ‘may you live in interesting times’ is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue ‘may you come to the attention of those in authority’ and finish with ‘may the gods give you everything you ask for.’ I have no idea about its authenticity.”

They are, to repeat myself, apocryphal. I can’t really claim to read either Traditional or Simplified Chinese, nor to speak any of the Chinese languages, but I find it rather fitting for a Westerner’s translations of apocryphal Chinese curses to possess what I’m sure is the awkward syntax I’ve imbued them with, so I don’t think that’s actually a problem. If my versions sound like a case of “wàirén⁽³⁾ trying (unsuccessfully) to make a Western fabrication sound authentically Chinese,” that seems genuinely apropos.

In any case, an identical translation of “May you live in interesting times” to mine appears on dozens of Chinese-language websites, so I’m sure that’s correct, but I can’t find the other two, so it’s possible that no one took the liberty of translating Pratchett’s curses to Chinese before I did, which strikes me as a shame.

(I originally simplified the second curse to 「願當局注意你」 [｢Yuàn dāngjú zhùyì nǐ｣, “May the authorities take notice of you”] because I very definitely didn’t feel I understood Chinese grammar well enough to do his full version justice, but I’ve come around to thinking that an awkward translation would fit better, and I like the idea of all three movement titles being equally long.)

To clarify some why I referred to “Chinese languages” in the plural: Written Chinese is one language, or at most two languages (Traditional and Simplified); it essentially represents Classical Chinese, which is no more spoken today than Latin (tamenetsī egomet latīnē loquor… aliquantum⁽⁴⁾). Spoken Chinese, by contrast, isn’t a single language; it’s a language family. By far the majority of Chinese speakers (a cool 1.2 billion) speak Standard Mandarin. Runners-up Southern Min, Shanghainese, and Cantonese have an order of magnitude fewer speakers than Standard Mandarin – which still means more speakers than all but about two dozen other languages, and more native speakers than all but about a dozen others.

(Southern Min and Shanghainese are each estimated to have slightly more speakers than Cantonese, but good luck finding any classes in anything other than Standard Mandarin or Cantonese outside China. Also, Standard Mandarin has more than twice as many native speakers [990 million] than the runner-up, Spanish [484 million], but when we count non-native speakers, English actually emerges as the world’s most widely spoken language, with over 1.5 billion total speakers; Mandarin has slightly under 1.2 billion.)

My hot take is that spoken Chinese is only considered a single language for political reasons: namely, that China’s government insists on it. (It doesn’t help that 「方言」、 ｢fāngyán｣, the Chinese word most often translated “dialect”, isn’t actually a precise match for that word, so this may be a case of an imprecise translation directly causing a semantic argument.) Standard Mandarin and Cantonese are no more the same language than Italian and Spanish – maybe even less so, as Italian and Spanish are somewhat mutually intelligible. Chinese is sometimes called a macrolanguage, but that seems wrong to me, since many spoken Chinese fāngyán are mutually unintelligible. Chinese linguists themselves often classify Chinese as a language family, following Fu Maoji’s formulation in the Encyclopedia of China, and that seems as accurate a classification as one could ask for.

One interesting fact I learned researching the above: Modern Standard Arabic has no native speakers. All Arabic speakers learn their local dialects at home and Modern Standard Arabic in school. (Imagine speakers of Romance languages learning their native languages at home and New Latin in school and you’ll be in the same ballpark.) Egyptian Arabic is the Arabic dialect with the most native speakers.

I let this sit for a couple months in between writing the second and third movements. It feels vaguely relevant to mention that I’d listened to Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica the night before I wrote the final movement. I’m not saying it sounds in any way like Trout Mask Replica, because nothing sounds in any way like Trout Mask Replica. But I probably was a bit more daring with my harmonic approach than I would have been otherwise.

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Dedicated toFor Ozzy Osbourne (1948-2025)

Loosely inspired by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” (composed by Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Osbourne, and Bill Ward) and T-Pain’s live cover thereof (performed by T-Pain, Curt Chambers, Rodney Jones Jr., Clemons Poindexter, & Joe Flip Wilson).

I need to stress that I’m not being facetious here: no less a source than Osbourne himself declared T-Pain’s version “the greatest ‘War Pigs’ cover ever”. (Butler likewise called it “excellent”.) T-Pain’s vocals are absolutely killer, and he and his band clearly get not just Black Sabbath but hard rock and heavy metal as a whole on a fundamental level, throwing in a guitar lick from Jeff Beck’s “Beck’s Bolero” here, a vocal tic from Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness” there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone do a better job covering Geezer Butler and Bill Ward than Jones and Poindexter do on the live recording, and Chambers demonstrates combined degrees of technicality, showmanship, and emotional intensity I’d only previously seen from Jimi Hendrix and Prince, and had grown afraid no electric guitarist would ever show again.⁽⁵⁾

But my favorite part is the arrangement: in particular, the reharmonization of the song’s final verse may well be my favorite moment of any cover ever. That’s partly because it’s a beautiful chord progression; it also just fits so well that I almost wish the song had been written like that in the first place. Lyrically, “War Pigs” is an explicitly religious sermon against war that ends with warmongers being condemned to hell at Judgement Day, so bumping the gospel music influence up to eleven for that stanza was truly inspired.

This track uses a chord progression similar, but not quite identical, to their reharmonization. Of course, I rarely write songs with only one set of chord changes, so inevitably, I wander out into left field from there.

This track’s shuffle rhythm is also no accident. It’s partly inspired by T-Pain’s cover, but just as heavily inspired by Sabbath themselves. All the major early hard rock and metal drummers were heavily inspired by jazz; Bill Ward grew up listening to big band music and cited Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Louie Bellson as his earliest influences. The swing in Sabbath’s playing is hard to overstate and often overlooked.

This isn’t just true of Ward; for instance, Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham cited Krupa, Rich, Max Roach, and Joe Morello as influences. This is obvious in his playing; the isolated drums of “Stairway to Heaven” are so heavily syncopated that, in another context, they could be the foundation of a club banger. Krupa’s influence extends beyond Ward and Bonham to Deep Purple’s Ian Paice and the Who’s Keith Moon; Rich also influenced Paice. Meanwhile, Cream’s Ginger Baker cited Roach, Phil Seamen, Baby Dodds, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Philly Joe Jones, and Papa Jo Jones as influences. In short, every major early hard rock drummer took a huge amount of inspiration from jazz drumming.⁽⁶⁾

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I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this (the melody was already in your head the moment you read the translation), but this is loosely inspired by the most diabolically unsingable earworm since a-ha’s “Take on Me”, 40 years ago. (You can’t belt an A5, either, can you?) I figured I’d make up a counterpoint that I actually could sing whenever the namesake Huntr/X song got stuck in my head. I have no idea if it’ll help yet.

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Although this song’s title comes from the last line of Genesis’ “Firth of Fifth”, the song itself is actually more strongly inspired by Nick Drake’s “River Man”. I’d been writing about the unity of opposites shortly before I began working on this song, and doing so made me fully aware that two separate but related concepts from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus influenced the line in question, namely “You can’t step in the same river twice” and the unity of opposites. Heraclitus, perhaps correctly, perceived change as the only constant in the universe. Translating the Genesis quote to Greek therefore felt like the thing to do.

“River Man” is actually based on a four-chord progression, but it’s one of the oddest four-chord progressions you’ll ever hear: C minor, E♭, A♭7, C major. There are a few variants once the strings come in, but those four chords underpin it for its entire running time. Like this song, it’s also in 5/4. Its use of the Lydian dominant mode inspired me to open with a C7(♯11) chord, which adds both B♭ and F♯ to the usual C major chord, thus employing both of Lydian dominant’s accidentals. From there, we go to E♭maj7, A♭add9, B♭aug7, and A♭7sus4. These are all very odd chords that, in the wrong context, might sound horribly dissonant, but they all somehow work together. I use other chords later in the song, but the main progression is just those five.

This track also isn’t finished yet, which is why it starts building up and then just kind of stops. I think it’s my favorite of these tracks so far, though.

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Interpolates “Diēs Īrae” by an unknown medieval author

Strangely, this is one of the few songs I’ve written in harmonic minor in years. For some reason I’ve tended to prefer natural minor, or some of the less frequently used modes like Dorian, Phrygian, and even Locrian.

Despite this track being longer than half of the tracks on this record at present, I think it’s probably got a lot more work to be done than a few of the shorter pieces. In particular, I intend to give it a more complex chord sequence – at present, it’s mostly i-iv-i-V-i-iv-V, and then whatever diminished 7th chord leads most appropriately to the next inversion of the i chord. At the start of the song, the chord sequences travel up; midway through, they start to travel down. There needs to be at least one other chord progression, probably two given the length of this song. I think the tension it’s building up is rather promising, though.

I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why I might name a song written in 2025 after Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Cēterum censeō rōmānōs eundōs domum esse. ⟨youtu.be/IIAdHEwiAy8⟩⁽⁷⁾)

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Another piece named after a classic of 18th-century political literature, this one by Edmund Burke. The general academic consensus is that Burke meant it as satire of the deistic rationalist Lord Bolingbroke, but his satire was so convincingly written that, much like much of Jonathan Swift’s work (which was one of Burke’s primary influences), Vindication has been read as sincere (e.g., by Murray Rothbard and Joseph Sobran). The philosophical anarchist William Godwin, while recognizing Burke’s satire, nonetheless was willing to support for real the arguments he made satirically. In the 21st century, it’s easy to see why:

The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor; and it is no less obvious, that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich; and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man’s acquisitions are in proportion to his labours. In a state of artificial society, it is a law as constant and as invariable, that those who labour most enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when we are told it, which we actually see before our eyes every day without being in the least surprised.

And:

The rich in all societies may be thrown into two classes. The first is of those who are powerful as well as rich, and conduct the operations of the vast political machine. The other is of those who employ their riches wholly in the acquisition of pleasure. As to the first sort, their continual care and anxiety, their toilsome days and sleepless nights, are next to proverbial. These circumstances are sufficient almost to level their condition to that of the unhappy majority; but there are other circumstances which place them in a far lower condition. Not only their understandings labour continually, which is the severest labour, but their hearts are torn by the worst, most troublesome, and insatiable of all passions, by avarice, by ambition, by fear and jealousy. No part of the mind has rest. Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations.

Since Vindication was first published anonymously, many readers took it to be Bolingbroke’s actual work and not a satire of his style, including Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton. Although Vindication received uniformly positive reviews, particularly for the quality of Burke’s writing, some reviewers missed the satire. Richard Hurd argued that Burke had so effectively imitated Bolingbroke’s style that he had practically defeated his own purpose, saying he “should take care by a constant exaggeration to make the ridicule shine through the Imitation. Whereas this Vindication is everywhere enforc’d, not only in the language, and on the principles of L. Bol., but with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other.” In other words, Hurd was suggesting, Burke had mustered such effective arguments in service of his satire of Bolingbroke that, even though he hadn’t intended them sincerely, many readers nonetheless might well find them convincing.

Nonetheless, I also often agree entirely with Burke’s non-satirical writing, e.g.:

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.

–Edmund Burke, letter to M. de Menonville, 1789-10

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.

–Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

He’s always thought-provoking even when I don’t agree with him.

In any case, I doubt anyone else will hear this, but Ennio Morricone’s «L’estasi dell’oro» (“The Ecstasy of Gold”), from 1966’s Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) was my vague inspiration to begin writing this. The reason I don’t think anyone else will hear it is that I very quickly went in an entirely different direction, for which I blame ADHD.

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Interpolates the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” (Pet Sounds, 1966), by Brian Wilson & Tony Asher

Dedicated toFor Brian Wilson (1942-2025)

Named after, and loosely inspired by, one of the greatest pop songs ever written. (The only pop songs I’d definitively rank above it are the Beach Boys’ own “Good Vibrations” at #2 and ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” at #1, though a few others undoubtedly tie it.)

Since Brian Wilson’s death earlier this year, I’d been wanting to compose a tribute. I can decide neither what the best Beach Boys track is nor which is my favorite, so I consulted the opinions of Wilson’s peers. What Paul McCartney calls “the greatest song ever written” and Hans Zimmer calls “a perfect song” felt like the ideal song to write a tribute to; in fact, I never really considered any other track in their discography.

(To clarify: I consider “Good Vibrations” the Beach Boys’ best pop song, specifically: it’s perfectly written, arranged, performed, and produced; as catchy as anything else they ever made; and one of the most complex songs in their discography. This doesn’t mean I consider it their best song overall, nor does it mean I don’t consider it their best song. They just have so many masterpieces that I can’t pick: “In My Room”, “Don’t Worry Baby”, “Help Me, Rhonda”, “California Girls”, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, “Let’s Go Away for Awhile”, “Here Today”, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times”, “Caroline, No”, “Heroes and Villains”, “Cabin Essence”, “Child Is Father of the Man”, “Surf’s Up”, “Sail On, Sailor”, and I could easily double this list with little effort.)

I’d actually been trying for a few days to write something that seemed inspired by “God Only Knows” without borrowing its chords outright. Nothing I tried really felt close enough until this track. The first eight measures’ progression is similar, but not identical, to the original track’s chords. After that, just to drive the point home, I outright borrowed some chords from the verses, chorus, and bridge, though often in modified form.

This is still in its early stages, but I feel it contains the seeds of something powerful. I hope to expand it as a tribute to Smile and make it a ten-minute epic (or even longer, if I can sustain the quality). If so, I’ll rename it «Ἐφηβῐκή σῠμφωνῐ́ᾱ πρός Θεῷ» («Ephēbĭkḗ sŭmphōnĭ́ā prós Theōî», “Adolescent Symphony to God”, paraphrasing “teenage symphony to God”, Wilson’s concept for Smile), use «Θεός μόνον γιγνώσκει» as this movement’s title, and title other movements after the songs they most resemble. Possible titles include:

However, what I’ll end up with is anyone’s guess. (Certainly, not that many movements.)

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I promise I didn’t set out to use a bunch of titles referencing classic works of political science when I started writing this album (even though the Oscar Wilde quote itself certainly has political connotations). I’ve just been revising some of my old writings, and since they delved deeply into politics, that’s resulted in politics occupying much more of my mental space.

The title is my Latin translation of Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, Niccolò Machiavelli’s magnum opus (most often referred to in English, when it’s referred to at all, as the Discourses on Livy). Machiavelli is indisputably the founder of the modern field of political science, but he gets a bad rap due to readers’ unfamiliarity with a little-known Machiavelli work called letteralmente tutto Niccolò Machiavelli scrivéva che non èra Il principe (Literally Everything Niccolò Machiavelli Wrote That Wasn’t The Prince).

In point of fact, The Prince is almost certainly either satire, deliberately bad advice, or both. Machiavelli had been tortured and imprisoned by the Medici family for his advocacy of republics. The Prince is dedicated to the Medici. It doesn’t take a political science degree (which I happen to have) to deduce that his intentions in writing it may not have been entirely sincere,⁽⁸⁾ making it perhaps the world’s first example of Poe’s Law.

While we’re on the subject, though, the most famous quote (mis)attributed to Machiavelli not only appears nowhere in his work but originates from a different author entirely. The bolded text in the passage:

«[…] e nelle azioni di tutti gli uomini, e massime de’ Principi, dove non è giudizio a chi reclamare, si guarda al fine. Facci adunque un Principe conto di vivere e mantenere lo Stato; i mezzi saranno sempre giudicati onorevoli, e da ciascuno lodati, perchè il vulgo ne va sempre preso con quello che pare, e con l’evento della cosa; e nel mondo non è se non vulgo […].» [emphasis added]

–Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, capitolo XVIII

Is frequently mistranslated “The ends justify the means”. In full, this passage actually means:

“[…] and in the actions of all humans, and especially of princes, where one may not appeal to logic, one looks at the results. So suppose a prince were to conquer and maintain the state; the means will always be judged honorable and approved by everyone, since the vulgar are always impressed with things’ appearances and outcomes; and there’s nothing but vulgarity in the world […].”

–Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVIII⁽⁹⁾

So it is a quote about utilitarianism, but it neither endorses nor condemns it; it merely observes that human nature is utilitarian. (Machiavelli’s biggest innovation, his decision to address what he thinks politics actually are rather than what he thinks they should be, is the main reason he’s the founder of political science.)

“The ends justify the means” is actually from Heroides (The Heroines) II.85 by Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso): “Exitus acta probat.” (Since Latin is that kind of language, this also means “The results prove the deeds [were done].”) I’m not sure how Machiavelli got conflated with it.

“It is better to be feared than loved” is also a misquotation of The Prince, both literally (Machiavelli wrote much safer, not better) and figuratively (it’s been truncated of all its nuance). It actually says:

«Nasce da questo una disputa: s'elli è meglio essere amato che temuto, o e converso. Rispondesi, che si vorrebbe essere l’uno e l’altro; ma perchè egli è difficile, che e’ stiano insieme, è molto più sicuro l’esser temuto che amato, quando s’abbi a mancare dell’un de’ duoi. […] Debbe non di manco el principe farsi temere in modo, che, se non acquista lo amore, che fugga l’odio […].»

–Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, capitolo XVII

This is still substantially truncated (hence the ellipses), but it communicates the gist of Machiavelli’s main arguments better. An accurate translation of this passage is:

“From this arises a dispute: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the converse. I would respond that one should wish to be both, but, since it is difficult to combine both qualities, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when one of the two is lacking. […] Nonetheless, the prince must inspire fear in a manner that, if he does not acquire love, he avoids hatred […].”

–Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVII

Again, Machiavelli likely meant this as satire, but it’s telling how much more nuanced his advice is than the truncated misquotation. He advises rulers to be both loved and feared if at all possible; he doesn’t say it’s better to be feared, just safer; and his advice about avoiding hatred is generally omitted entirely.

At any rate, I often just sit down and write at my computer. In this case, I was actually messing around on the piano when I hit on what became the opening of this song’s piano part. That’s one of the reasons it’s one of the rare songs I’ve written in 4/4 (though I later switch to 5/4 and then 6/4, as one does).

I opted to use the qanun (a kind of zither instrument) for this song’s melody in part because it’s an ancient instrument that may well date back to Ancient Greece. I also just really liked how it sounded in the context of the arrangement. I instantly felt like I was onto something with the main melody, and sometimes that takes a lot longer to happen. I may expand this song’s arrangement, but unless I decide to add new sections to the song, I think the main melody is already complete.

A tribute to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”, one of the most gorgeous and profound songs of all time. This is still a very early sketch; its main chord progression incorporates harmonic elements of the original song’s outro, though as it progresses, I throw increasingly complex jazz harmonization on top of it. I also employ variants of its verse and chorus progressions once each near the end of the track. (“What’s Going On” uses far fewer chords than I expected it to, proving once again that there can be beauty in simplicity.)

I obsessed over this track’s structure and pace for a while, since I began writing it with an exact mood in mind; now that I have it, I’m in the process of expanding the arrangement and writing a proper melody. I threw in a few brief Easter egg references to other tracks – in particular, I quoted Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, a quote of Nobuo Uematsu’s “Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII” (no more than a few notes each), and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” (also from What’s Going On). All of this is combining to make what’s fast becoming one of my favorite tracks on this album.

I originally planned to quote “Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII” and “Mercy Mercy Me” only briefly, but the more I worked with them, the more I became convinced their similarity was an entirely intentional reference on Uematsu’s part, given how deeply embedded the game’s ecological themes are. The two melodies interwove too beautifully for me to downplay their similarity, so I’m crediting Uematsu and Gaye as cowriters for this section, which I ultimately plan to give its own title. I’ll probably write at least one additional movement. Although the song title is Latin, I plan to use Greek for the movement titles. Possibilities include:

• «Τῐ́ς σῠμβαίνει, ᾰ̓δελφέ?», «Tĭ́s sŭmbaínei, ădelphé?», “What’s Going On, Brother?”
• «Θεός ἐστῐ́ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη», «Theós estĭ́ ăgắpē», “God Is Love”
• «Κῡ́ριε ἐλέησον μοι (Ἡ οἰ̃κολογία)», «Kū́rĭe eléēson moi (He oíkología)», “Lord Have Mercy on Me (The Ecology)”
• «Ὅλως ἱερός», «Hólos hierós», “Wholly Holy”
• «Δυσθῡμία ἐσωτερῐκη̃ς πόλεως (ἐπᾰ́γει μοι ἐπῐθῡμει̃ν κρᾱ́ζειν)», «Dusthūmía esōteríkês póleōs (epắgei moi epĭthūmeîn krā́zein”)», “Inner City Despair (Makes Me Wanna Holler)”

The title mashes up “What’s Going On” and the next track on its eponymous album, “What’s Happening Brother”. “‘Going on’ and ‘happening’ are synonyms,” I hear you object. There’s always a know-it-all.