Making of 'The Hand'- Paz the First Castle Metal Project Had Finished In
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Making Of ‘The Hand’- Paz The first Castle Metal project had finished in late 2007 and the momentum carried me on to write the second album as a direct follow on. The riffs were coming quite regularly and, apart from one song, which was thrown out and a new one inserted, I was happy with all of it especially the tracks, ‘Hail! Victory!’, ‘The King Of England’ and ‘The Bleak Decisions Of Man’. Even though it was an extension of The Castle Metal Project it was more polished, more grandiose and had better performances. In short ‘The Bleak Decisions Of Man’ showed a natural progression and demonstrated what was possible if Castle Metal was taken a little more seriously. The problem afterwards was how do you follow an album you’re completely happy with? Easy, you keep writing but I had run out of riffs, the momentum had gone and the creative tank was dry and I had serious doubts about there ever being a third album. My initial ideas of making a third instalment with the exiled King coming back from France was blown away with a phone call from Hedgy. He said he had an idea for a story but it doesn’t have any big battles in it, no ballistas, no Trebuchet and definitely no Mangonels of which I had a song left over called this. It was going to be a down beat, dark tale about an antihero who is betrayed. Cheery and rousing stuff, I’ll get right on it, I thought. In the past, the lyric duty fell to both of us. The music was already written it just needed some words. I would say to Hedgy, this is about a joust, and by the end of the evening we would have the words and a test demo with the ‘actual’ lyrics. Because it was going to be Hedgy’s story he said he wanted to write all the lyrics which was fine by me (I find lyric writing a necessary evil of song-writing). The problem with trying to write when the creative tank is dry is you try and force out the ideas settling for any old nonsense and this was certainly the case in the early writing. There was a lot of discussion about the direction of Castle Metal 3. Hedgy preferred the longer more progressive songs from The Bleak Decisions of Man such as ‘The King Of England’, ‘Overthrow,’ ‘Spiral Into Madness’ and the title track itself. I am more of a thrash metal fan and prefer the more immediate material so when Hedgy said he would like the Castle Metal 3 (CM3) album to be more progressive I had a problem, I didn’t really want to go down that route. I think it was my lack of commitment in the early writings that made me put up with any old rubbish that emitted from the ole 6-string. After a couple of months, I had written over seventy minutes of music, all long, all progressive and all as dull as ditch water. It was coming across as the previous album’s drawn out hand-me-downs rather than something new. Hedgy seemed to like it, but not like it enough and I wasn’t getting anything from the music. This was metal, it’s supposed to cause a reaction within you whether it is excitement, anger, misery or joy. The music was flat and yet I still think it was a surprise when I said to Hedgy, “I’m going to scrap it all and start again”. We concluded this was the best option because neither of us were completely happy, and it’s not as if we’re on a schedule and we’ll never be signed so, let’s take our time. About 6 months later Hedgy had gathered his ideas and sent me song titles with a paragraph of what was going to happen in the songs (no lyrics yet). There were ten songs in the initial lay out, an extract is below: I am the hand I. Soldier – He is a soldier and has been for years, this is the position he ostensibly holds but in reality and secretly he is much more. II. Lover – He is in love with his lords daughter and she seems to love him however he is not in a position as a soldier to do much about it other than meet in secret. III. Spy – He is a spy for his lord. He does the jobs that need doing secretly, he will kill someone if necessary but does not do so on a whim. (think thief) The Poisoning Sent to dose the water supply with a sleeping draft however he has been given a poison instead, his boss want his rival killed and doesn’t care if he has to kill the whole household to do it. He knows his man won’t be an assassin so tricks him. Sickness Vomiting sickness which makes people drink more water, takes a full day to get serious so everyone has had it in their cooking etc by the end of the day. By the next morning most if not all affected are dead. Dawning of a new day I. Betrayal – His boss sends men to kill him so no one will find out who did what, he also puts out the news that the spy is responsible for the poisoning so the townsfolk want him dead too. II. Realisation – Having escaped from the lords men the spy discovers what has happened and is filled with remorse. Poisoning men, women and children is not his way. He flees town by the skin of his teeth and is a wanted man. Depression and rage fight for control of his mind. And then it was, ‘there you go Paz, do your stuff’. There is one album I always go back to when I begin to write. I use it as a template for a creative process. Even though the music I write sounds nothing like it this particular album has got so much variety, so many great ideas and yet is still credible and totally the band’s style that it is a great place to start from. It tells me that not every song has to be the same and there are so many ways in creating emotion with a couple of guitars, some kick ass drums and a bit of melody (Should I divulge its name? Ok then, The Years Of Decay by Overkill). I got busy and started to write lots of ideas. I tend to write little bits of riffs along to a drum track and save it as ‘CM3 Idea 1’ and so on. After I had around forty ideas I would then listen to them all and expand the ones that still sound ok several days/weeks later. With these ideas I applied them to the structure Hedgy had laid out for me. Not every idea was thrown away in the early cull. What became ‘I Am The Hand’ was the only full song that survived. Other ideas that survived were the main riff in ‘The Poisoning’, the rain opening for ‘Return’ (part 2) and a few bits and bobs in ‘Redemption’ (part 2 again). Very early in the writing it was clear that there were going to be more songs than Hedgy had initially envisaged. ‘I Am The Hand’ was about three subjects and suddenly it was three separate songs as I split each subject (Still no lyrics). I knew ‘I Am The Hand’ was a big ball busting riff and decided to use that as an opener, but then the first of many changes of heart happened and it was suddenly something else, and then the next week it was something else. In the end I returned back to the game Stronghold and modified a brilliant piece of music called Honormix_1. As Hedgy described more of the story I realised that blaster style songs such as ‘Boiled In Oil’ and ‘Hail! Victory!’ were going to sound out of place in such a dark fable. So now I had an extra problem to add to the mix. How was I going to make CM3 sound exciting, without upping the tempo? It also had to be quite progressive and all hang together and make sense. In the end I decided on a different approach. The idea was to make the music more interesting in respect of song structures, changes and really defining the Castle Metal style. I mean, what the hell was Castle Metal anyway? I had called it Castle Metal after reading several shelf magazines who deem it necessary to label music even if it doesn’t make sense, such as ‘epic neo-classical hardcore math metal’. Castle Metal is metal that is about castles. I had no intention in writing folk style metal with quirky tunes because Falconer, Ensiferum and all the other folky/battle metal bands do it so much better, so why copy them? The Castle Metal style is big riffs coupled with short melodies and tunes, oh yeah, and long instrumental breaks. The Hand wasn’t written with part 1 and part 2 in mind, this suggestion came much later. The Hand was written as a whole. With Hedgy nailing the story even further (still no lyrics) I began to structure the songs in an order that was true to the tale, had the all the peaks and quiet parts in all the right places and was a balanced album from start to finish.