Trusties

Oikku:
For this one I had an almost complete arrangement ready. Most of the key lines of the lyrics come from Matti’s vast idea archives. We then worked on the lyrics together adding to them and making them fit the melody. Suti’s backward guitar parts complement the atmosphere nicely.

Ville:
Yes, most of the bass line and even some of the drum fills came directly from Marko’s demo. The section after the guitar solo took a little bit new direction during the band sessions.

Oikku:
About the title Djemoniee: it doesn’t actually mean anything. I had to remember the original idea somehow so I made up a name for it by verbalizing the sound the guitar makes when playing the main riff. It was the working title before we had any lyrics and we kept it because it sounds mysterious 🙂

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Oikku:
Matti wrote the original draft of the song with the verse and chorus in 4/4. The two of us worked on it together tweaking the chords, adding the quieter B-section, changing the verse time signature etc. During rehearsals we felt it needed some more material in the middle so we wrote some of it together with the whole band.

Ville:
The vocal background riff ‘Hope/love is the strongest thing …” was a last-minute idea by Matti. He had been talking about some kind of vocal idea for some time, and one day we just started experimenting in the studio which resulted in a new dimension to the song.

The rhythm track for the chorus took a lot of time and experimenting to come up with. We didn’t want to follow the obvious path and just play along the guitars, but create some counterpoint and give a more living rhythm. This is one of the rare places, where someone might feel inspired to dance to our music. Just be careful for the following part in 13/8 time, we don’t wanna be responsible for breaking anybody’s legs.

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Ville:
I feel that this song somehow belongs to the same category as ‘Sounds of Life’ and ‘Universe’s End’ from our earlier albums. It doesn’t really sound like them, it’s more in the way it’s constructed. I don’t say that they have a similar structure either, but perhaps they are linked by the strict way of using a simple motive to build the melodies and the symmetry found in both music and the lyrics.

I wrote the song for the most part already in 1999, and re-visited part of the lyrics after the 911 occured. I somehow saw the macabre side of the lyrics, and wanted to bring more focus to that. The starting point for the lyrics was a little writing experiment I had to make during an English class. I was told by the teacher to write something that makes sense, but that turned out to be quite difficult, when I started thinking about it. So I wrote a song about making sense instead. Note that any kind of sexual associations are entirely a product of the listener’s or reader’s (dirty) imagination, the text has nothing to do with that kind of matters.

This must have been the first song of the album to be arranged and rehearsed by the new line-up. The moog themes and little solo were the last parts written during the recording sessions, and I’m quite fond of the melody there. Janne says he came-up with the drum part behind the moog-part when lying drunk on his sofa. Suti improvisized the frenzy dual guitar solo in the middle section.

There are lots of musical influences and sources for the material of the song. I am defineatly in debt to a couple of 80’s heavy metal bands (there’s actually a very clear reference to one of their pieces), to a finnish Jazz-trio, to a couple of old friends, and to some old Prog dinosaurs to say the least.

If these sound like diverse influences, then what about the vocal-stuff sounding like Jim Morrison doing hip-hop and the rhythm track which is basically a latin dance, still forming a very cohesive progressive metal piece?

Oikku:
I went to the pharmacy yesterday to get medication for my left hand tenosynovitis. They had the pills and stuff in drawers arranged in alphabetic order and labeled with four letters: BURA, CODE, DEXA, etc. The doctor had ordered something starting with VO so the pharmacist girl reached out to the drawer labeled VIAG 🙂

I wonder why I’m telling this story on this page…

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Oikku:
In good old Trusties tradition there has to be a song composed from themes of other songs. Ville did all the hard work and I got to have fun recording weird guitar noises into this one 🙂

Ville:
Creation of this kind of pieces have always started quite spontaneously, I don’t think there were any conscious decision to do these. The variations have just started emerging after the actual songs had been put together. Let’s see if we’re ever going to perform this one live…

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Oikku:
Rock music is all about the sounds and the arrangement. There are countless of great songs that really have nothing special to them if you reduce the harmony to basic voicings and just play the melody and harmony straight on a piano. What makes them special is the way the musicians execute the song – the specific rhythms, chord voicings and articulations each instrument plays.

For this album I had a couple of songs, “Rituals” and “Djemoniee” where I had very strong feelings about what the arrangement needed to be. This kind of dictatorshipness might become problematic in a mostly democratic band setting like ours. A big part of the fun in playing in a band is getting to make up your own parts. However, the guys were supportive about it and they were willing to try the parts as written. I don’t mean to say that the arrangement did not develop during rehearsals and tracking – it’s more about staying true to the initial vision of the song where arranging and composing were equally important to me.

The verse drums & bass riff dates back to when we first started writing songs together with Matti. The B-part (“don’t try to change”) came from a guitar instrumental tune I wrote on a 4-track cassette machine back in the day. The 11th chords were added to A2 during rehearsals. Janne came up with the polyrhythmic intro drum part during tracking. When we recorded vocals Ville came up with the brilliant background vocal part for the “sex” section.

Ville:
I didn’t realize I ever took part in a sex section 🙂

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Oikku:
We played an acoustic version of this song live some ten years ago but the middle section we had back then never really worked. Finally for this album I got the inspiration to come up with the 9/8 part that made the song complete. Ville and Janne invented a perfect big but spacious rhythm for the A/B sections leaving lots of room for the guitar to mess around.

Ville:
Ville: Note that the A/B rhythm track is derived from the 9/8 part. Actually I think there were two totally different versions of the middle part in the acoustic arrangement, right?

Oikku:
There might have been two versions but I remember just the one attempting to be funky.

Anybody remember playing the rain stick on this one? It’s there just before the beginning of the 9/8 section. I might have stolen it from one of the WJWTRTW tracks during mixing but I’m not sure…

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Ville:
The piano melody opening the song was also the starting point for the composition process. Usually we replace the piano with guitars, because they sound better, but this time also the piano was allowed to stay. I took the chords to the melody from a cheesy 6/8 folk-song, which had been lying in the drawer of my desk unused for some time, being too ordinary and unimpressive. The dark atmosphere of the B-part provides some contrast, which will probably spoil the hit potential promised by the opening. But the music sort of wrote itself here, and didn’t ask for my permission to make this transition.

After the second A-part, there follows something which could be interpreted as a chorus, except this is the only time it’s heard in the song, so maybe it can’t be called the chorus? It was the last thing written for the song and it replaced an instrumental section that was noodling around G and Am7/G chords in 5/4 time. Before returning to the easy-going variation of the main riff it was appropriate to create some tension by altering the tonal focus a little. Thus came to be the ‘Some say you can’t have…’ part, where the melody is another variation of the theme.

After repeating the B-part, this time in a metal disguise, a wholly new part is introduced, perhaps with slightly Canadian flavour. After some moments of confusion we find our selves singing along the A-part again, which transforms into the opening riff and a gives you a moment to catch your breath again. We tried to record Matti shouting ‘Oh yeah’ here, but it wasn’t to happen this time, and Frank Marino was not around either. In the end we can’t escape from spinning in a little familiar loop, so maybe this is the chorus of the song? The very ending gives a little nod towards Accept or Judas Priest.

Oikku:
Canadian flavour… oh, you must mean Anvil, right?

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And the winner of the review race is… Steven Reid over at Sea Of Tranquility !!

“… With interesting time signatures, delightful guitar, keyboard and bass inter changes along with intelligent and thought provoking lyrics sung by a singer with a wide sphere of influences and impressive range, Trusties third album is modern progressive rock presented in a most interesting and involving way. Repeated listens will be rewarded.”

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Oikku:
This song was composed in a top-down manner. The starting/ending riff came from my way-back-when archives. After dreaming up the verse and chorus, I wrote down on paper what kind of parts I’d like to have around them. The “blueprint” was very informal with instructions like: “a massive slow 3/4 section followed by a weird and very quiet minimal part” and “insert whale mating call here”. After that there was just the matter of finding the right notes to match the instructions.

I don’t really like to comment on lyrics because they can be interpreted in many ways. But, I’ll say this: what would “outside observers” make of it when they’d look at us and find everybody speaking into a little radio on their ear?

Ville:
I know what you mean about commenting lyrics. When thinking about it, it should be easier to talk about lyrics, than about music. But somehow I’m afraid that it might restrict the freedom of interpretation. The lyrics should be kind of complete by themselves, and not need any guidance.

Me and Janne had a thrash-metal band as kids, this seems to have affected the solo background. Or did you Marko inspire it? Anyway it works well in a fusion type of harmonic context I think. Another thing that got contributed in the band sessions, was to inspire Marko to build a climax towards the end of the solo, and then start building a new beginning from silence when the vocals return.

Oikku:
I remember us working on the solo section at rehearsals trying to use many different styles in it to keep it interesting. Probably someone mentioned ‘Testament’ and well… certain things are bound to happen if the T-word gets mentioned 🙂

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