Seeking the sanctuary

March 16th, 2007

Hi again, sorry for the pause, I’ve been really busy so I haven’t had the time to write here. Tonight I’m going to go to see Bleak live, and I am really looking forward to that. I’ve heard that they are a really great live band. They sound great on the record, so I have high expectations, we’ll see if they are able to fulfil them. But yeah, to the point, here’s a little something about the song “Sanctuary”.

Again I dug up the original demo, it had a cool intro I had already forgotten. I wonder why we didn’t use this in the version on “Through My Eyes”.

This song was again quite easy to write, it kind of wrote itself (the original version I mean). This song was inspired by the late and great Further Seems Forever, it really doesn’t resemble their music that much, but still that’s the origin of inspiration. I came up with the c-part, and then built the rest of the song around that. I remember that the verse came out surprisingly easy, I just hit the first chord, and immediately knew what the next chords should be. If only song writing would always go that fluently…

After the chorus and the melody were ready, I picked up a pile of lyrics/poems Archie had given me. When I make songs, it usually goes in the order of first the music, then the lyrics. When the music (backing tracks and melody lines) is ready, I sing the melody with irrational (e.g. na-na-naa) lyrics to get the first demo done. Writing the lyrics is like making a puzzle, since the melody is already done, or at least the guide lines, it’s a matter of writing the lyrics in such a way that they fit the melody, so that the syllables of the “real” lyrics fit the na-na-naa lyrics. Not the easiest task, not to me at least. But back to the song itself, so I picked up the pile of Archie’s lyrics and searched for something that would fit, firstly the song and also the melody, and pretty much the only suitable alternative was “Sanctuary”. There were only words for one verse and approximately half a chorus, so I had to make the rest of the words myself and rearrange the original poem a bit.

We had a bit of a hard time with this song when we started to rehearse it. In the original demo there was no pause before the last chorus, it started straight after the c-part. Then at rehearsals when Archie was outside smoking, I came up with that triplet-fill and that was the missing piece. Nowadays the live version of this song has a few more added triplets than heard on “Through My Eyes”.

I was a bit surprised to see our photo in this month’s issue of Sue. Obviously it was a nice surprise. Check it out if you’re interested. But I guess that’s all for now, maybe I’ll put up some thoughts and feelings about tonight’s concert tomorrow. ‘Till next time.

-Kari