Words: Ian Tanner
Music: Andrew Horrocks, Ian Tanner, Al Powell and Mike Powell
This is probably my favorite Awakening song. It has so many elements that I'm proud of and it's about a subject that was very personal to me, and still is.
My cousin, Dan Squires, died of cancer when he was barely in his 20's. He was the same age as my brother Rob, and although their age similarity made them very close, my cousin Dan was definitely my favorite cousin. We had so many good times together growing up, and music was a huge part of both of our lives. When we would get together, making music was always on the agenda. Somewhere I have a cassette tape that was made when I was probably about 12 years old of Dan, Rob and me making up a song called "The Out of Order Blues" about a broken vending machine!!
Dan had a very unpleasant last year of his life and passed away in 1985. I have one major regret about this story, and that was, I never went to see Dan while he was really sick. I was afraid of what cancer was and how it had been explained to me, so rather than see him looking frail and possibly not being mentally in his faculties anymore, I took the easy way out and stayed away. I was a scared teenager, but I still regret it very much.
When The Awakening started writing this song, I wanted to write the words for my cousin Dan.
The song would have started from another introductory riff from Andy, and then we all started collaborating. I'm pretty sure I wrote the melody, but everybody was bringing in ideas. The use of the 7/4 time signature was an added challenge.
For me, the guitar solo in this song is possibly the single greatest thing Andy ever played on an album of ours. I know it wasn't an easy solo to come up with. This was another case where Al showed up in the studio to help Andy do his stuff. I wasn't there for any of this, but when I heard it later on, I was extremely moved by it. (It was played on his recently purchased, modified Fender Telecaster). It is such an emotional solo, and I actually like that it is very slightly flawed. Andy wouldn't be happy to hear that, as I'm sure he spent hours and hours to make sure it WAS perfect, but it really wasn't. It sounds vulnerable, and at times unsure, but it is so very powerful.
I'll flash way forward for a second - to our final live performance ever, at Creation Fest in 1989. I do this because, (and I'll elaborate more on this later), Andy and I knew this was probably our last time on stage together as a band. When we performed this song and Andy played that solo, I was almost moved to tears on stage. I'll never forget that moment. It would NOT be like me to lose my composure like this, but the emotion level was unbelievable at that moment, and Andy's solo was almost too much for me to take.
The spoken voice at the end of the song is credited to our producer Rick Hutt, and that may be the case, but I'm almost positive that it is actually Al Powell doing it. I'll have to get a confirmation on this from one of the guys.
The song starts with the sound of me "apparently" saying "Wake up!" How that happened is quite a bizarre and flukey technical story!
Far into the production of this song, I wanted to attempt something very experimental just for the heck of it. I wanted to put the multi-track tape on backwards, and randomly vocalize over the whole song. This meant that I had to sing from the end of the song to the beginning with everything playing backwards. When I reached the end of the performance, which was actually before the beginning of the song, I said "THANK YOU!"
None of my backwards singing worked, so we erased it all, except the THANK YOU at the end/beginning. We couldn't believe that when we heard Thank You backwards, it sounded like "Wake up!" How perfect!!
So that bizarre twist of luck became the opening sound of this intense song.
I can honestly say that there aren't too many songs from our Awakening catalog that I could see myself performing today, but this is a song I would love to perform again someday.
Thanks for reading.
Ian - June 18/09
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