Although the first demo from Dean arrived here in the first week of October 2014 (yes, that's prior to the release of "A Forest of Fey"), with the second song-demo coming in on December 31st (I still remember standing in the kitchen, ready to leave the house for the annual new years eve party with the family), we didn't really "work" on something. We just threw some demos at each other to fiddle about...Plans were made for two sub-releases during 2015, as Dean had some family stuff going on over the year. One was a "Best of" Free-EP with three re-recorded songs (drum-wise), and the other one was an acoustic EP. We developed the idea during recording of "Forest..." as we have quite some acoustic stuff going on there as well. We were on a hiatus for 2015, so to say, just interrupted by the "Voices for Hospices" charity CD with Mr. Steve Hackett and others. We wrote and recorded our bit in February. Check it out, it's really a great album, really worth the cause!
Anyway, with all those fiddling about, autumn arrived quicker than we thought, and we quite had some songs together already, when suddenly, destiny struck... It was one late evening, we were chatting about different things, debating song structures and stuff, as suddenly Luke went in and said "I hope you're all sitting down, ‘cause I have a concept story for you". Within the next five sentences, he laid out the complete foundation for the next album.
Silence in the chat. You could hear the literal pin drop. After that shock (in a very positive way), ideas were filling the chatroom. Sub-plots, characters, moods, key-events and -songs. Everybody would then add descriptions of places, characters, actions, stories and so on in an online shared script-book. I know I'm probably a bit biased (forget that, I AM biased as f§#k!), but I have yet to find an album with a story as dense and intense as this one. Won't give away too much, as that's reserved for a later announcement, but it IS. PRETTY. DAMN. AWESOME.
Being not that pleased with the drum sound on "Forest..." (which is my own responsibility, so if anybody, it is I that is to blame for that), I fiddled a bit on the knobs and faders (given the fact that I had quite some spare time during the year) and came up with - what I would call - the most transparent and clean drum sound that ever left my Mix-console's Main Outs so far. Have a listen at the sound bites (which will be released in some future blog-posts), and you'll notice...
We're really excited about the progress of the writing and recording so far, we have lots of songs and musical bits in a near-finished state, and of course we will post some samples here and there, so keep your eyes and ears peeled...
Stefan