In DA poll #2 we asked our community what behind the scenes material of our first single they would like to see.
The choice was up to them:
A) Lyrics / backstory
B) Songwriting / structure
C) Producing, mixing, mastering.
Option A was the winner with just over 57%, so here I give a deeper insight into the lyrics, the first-person narrators within the song and the historical background.
Let’s do this!
1. The lyrics
Behind The Wall is a concept song, so the lyrics tell a continuous story. What was very important to me while writing it is to build everything chronologically logical on each other to create a convincing plot, but at the same time to use a poetic language.
What I personally like very much is the opening in verse 1 with the almost barked imperatives. This directly underlines the threatening and stressful situation we are in:
Search them
Hunt them
Find them
Bring them down
What is certainly interesting to know is that the first line I had in mind was the chorus, everything else came naturally in connection with Luke’s riffing. And all in all I got to the final lyrics of Behind The Wall pretty fast – I think after 3-4 days.
Which brings us to the next point. Of course, the finished lyrics are not just there, they are the result of trials, revisions and improvements. Below is an example for you. If I hadn’t edited the first raw version, verse 3 would be like this today:
Hold on
Back down
Hold your breath and wait
I feel their bloodlust
They are hunting us
If you want to read the complete final lyrics, you can do so here.
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2. The first-person narrators
Now we come to the part that was the most difficult for me. Balancing the first-person narrators and allocating time within the song has been a great challenge for me.
Because if you give the aggressors too much space, you send the wrong message, and if you give the victims too much space, you may unintentionally make them appear weak.
In the end, I decided to let the voice of the aggressors speak in verses 1 and 2 to create a corresponding emotional prelude.
From chorus 1 onwards, the perspective of the victims then takes the lead, with the two sides overlapping within the chorus by the words “behind the wall” sung together. Through this I wanted to emphasize the closeness in which the two sides are located.
Musically, the song ends quite sudden, and regarding the lyrics, just as abruptly: “I see light” expresses the sad fact that the Frank family’s hiding place was finally discovered and the secret door was opened from the outside.
3. The historical background
As mentioned above, Behind The Wall is a concept song (it’s part of our concept EP which will be released in 2021). It is based on a real event and is about the touching story of the Frank family.
In 1942, the situation became so threatening that they had to go into hiding in a back building in Amsterdam. Anne Frank wrote her world-famous diary there.
On August 4, 1944, the Nazis found the Franks’ hiding place. A few weeks later, the family was taken to Auschwitz, and its members were separated. Anne died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in early 1945.
It was the brave girl’s wish that her story be told over and over again so that she and her loved ones could live on in people’s hearts even after their deaths. We hope our song is a small contribution to this.
By the way, Demon Reports recently published an insane review of Behind The Wall that perfectly sums up our intention behind the song. Author Vladimir Cincovic found better words for it than we could have done ourselves – sometimes you just need a view from the outside.
2 Comments
Toby Gamble
I listened to the song and liked the story line but I didn’t care for the vocals and that is okay its a matter of taste so please don’t take that personal. I would like to see clean vocals in more of your songs.
Barry
Hi, absolutely no problem, thanks for chiming in with your opinion! The mixture of different vocal expressions is part of our style. How we implement that in a song then always depends very much on the theme. Here it fits absolutely perfectly from our point of view, because the opposing sides within the story come out even better that way. We are already working intensively on the next songs and will always have a lot of clean vocals in them as well. Stay true to us 😀🤘