A very early work in progress that’s meant to be 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’m even going to attempt to finish it in this style – I may end up going in a completely different direction with it.

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, and the first three in particular are such fundamental influences on my style that I’m not sure I could write something without their influence on it if I tried. As a great Canadian philosopher once wrote: “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 don’t think 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 changes than Tony Banks.

I avoided key changes in the music I was writing for Tempus Irae Redux, where the music would sometimes mix with a chant drone on C; thus, key changes 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 use key changes in a new composition for once has felt oddly liberating.

Naturally, this modulates keys a few times, using some variant of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” progression, if memory serves. Just don’t ask me to improvise over it.

Contents · Tracklist · Discography · Portfolio · Contact me · Website index

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 800 million) 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.

Contents · Tracklist · Discography · Portfolio · Contact me · Website index

Dedicated, of course, to 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⁾

Contents · Tracklist · Discography · Portfolio · Contact me · Website index

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.