Words: Ian Tanner
Music: Ian Tanner and Mike Powell
This is on my list of best tracks ever, as far as things we recorded. For all the flaws on this album, we really got most things right on this track. I could write pages and pages about this song, but I'll try to keep it to the most interesting points.
This, along with Where Is Love was started by Mike Powell at home, and then finished off when I met with him to complete the writing process. This song clearly illustrates what can make a band great, and how the whole democratic process of a band can be a wonderful thing when it's functioning properly.
Andy had established the group as being a well-produced, well-focused band. When I got involved, the artsy aspects started to creep into the mix, and by the time we did our first album, there was no denying that Andy and I seemed to have the bulk of the creative material going on. It sometimes made for some tense creative moments when the meeting of the minds would happen.
Mike and Al didn't think the same way that Andy or I did, and that clash and difference of direction had a lot to do with the actual genesis of the Awakening sound. Had Mike been a Bruford fan like I was, or had Al been a Prog fan like I was, or a Pop and Jazz fan like Andy was, our playing style would have been a lot different. Mike and Al were into honest, emotional, rock music. It didn't have to be in some weird time signature to get them going, but for me, it was always about putting something complicated into the music.
Early in our existence, this difference of motivation was a key ingredient in defining our sound.
I can safely say, that had Andy and I been a duo back then, we would never have come up with an idea like The Knife Of Life!
Mike was always into energetic activities, and certainly weaponry and more gothic outlooks were a part of Mike's thinking. He used to have Martial Arts weapons at his house, and I'll never forget him buying a "blow gun" which if used properly could have killed all of us! Mike, of course was harmless, but he loved all of this weird stuff.
It totally made sense that he would come up with left-field ideas like Fireside or Knife Of Life. It's how the less out-there members of the band (Andy, Al and I) interpreted these extremes that made these songs so right for our band.
My explanation is going on and on. My apologies. It's hard to put this stuff into words.
I just believe that Mike and Al's contributions to the band were sometimes hard to measure at the time, and I feel good to know that although I was the singer, and Andy was in many ways the de-facto leader of the band, Mike and Al had a great deal to do with the musical and lyrical direction of the band. I'll move on now before I wander any further away from the topic!
The first thing you hear on Knife Of Life is some silly circus music. This was not an accident. Months of working on this song meant months of recording onto tape and then hitting the Rewind button on the tape machine. When you would rewind the tape, you would hear playback information coming off the playback heads on the machine, but of course this audio would be in fast motion and backwards, as the tape made its way back to the start of the song. There was this peculiar melody that kept playing from the machine. It was actually Andy's guitar part being played backwards at fast tempo. After months of hearing this silly backwards melody, I thought it would be funny to replicate the sound of it using the D-50 keyboard. So that's why that section at the very beginning is happening!
The bass playing on this song is fantastic. Al played 2 different bass parts. One was his newly acquired Fender fretless bass, and the other was his normal bass. The fretless really gave the song another disturbing dimension. We really wanted this to be a weird song, so if there was any technique we could use to "weird it up" we would!
The harmonies on the chorus were done by Andy. Most of the background vocals on our albums were done by me, probably because it was easiest for me to do. But there are a few spots on the albums where you can tell someone else is doing the harmonies. Andy's low, breathy harmony in the chorus is great.
The middle section is our Magical Mystery Tour moment for all time! I can't tell you how many hours, days and weeks we spent putting that middle section together. There is so much detail in here, that I'm sure most people have never heard all of the little candies and surprises we put in there. First of all, Mike continued a trend he started during the first album, that being reciting poetry over some kind of creepy intro!! He did this during the intro of Fireside, (where he recited the first verse of the soon-to-be-written song "November,") , and at the start of the bridge to Knife, he does verse 2. He would later do another verse during the actual song November, which we recorded in early 1989.
In addition to Mike's spoken words, there is an endless list of spoken do-dads all over the place. I recall, that we stood around one microphone and said a bunch of random things on a separate piece of tape, and then messed with them later on. At one point Andy said "Elim Hall" (and later, we spliced it up by taking something else he had said earlier and made his statement into "Elim Spall!"). I started saying some kind of insane Russian thing, which was meaningless. (It sounds like "Latenya Nevanya"!). Our favorite line was Mike totally taking a shot at our A&R guy in Nashville, when he say's "Jeff - your Datsun looks like a door stop!"
You can also hear Mike talking about a dream he had about Lorne Green, the famous Canadian actor who was in Gunsmoke! This leads to yet another in-joke..."I looked at him, and he looked at me, and he said.... (whoa...) there go those whoas again!"
So even then, we were well aware that we did too many WHOAS in our songs!!
If you listen carefully towards the very end of this crazy section, you might hear Mike yelling "Stop the tape! Stop the tape!!"
As if this WEREN'T enough to confuse everybody, it got worse!!
Andy's guitar part through this whole section was extraordinarily hard to put together. He wanted the part to sound backwards but it still had to actually be the proper melody. The only way this could be accomplished back in 1988 was to learn how to play the guitar part backwards, put the tape on backwards, and record it while all the music was playing backwards. This is no easy feat. You can't imagine how hard it is to count or know where you are in the arrangement when everything you're hearing is backwards. You can imagine this probably took over a day to complete. In the end, you hear the proper guitar melody, but it sounds like it was recorded backwards, because it was!! (That's also why you hear his last ringing note continuing into the final verse. Andy would have started on that note while the machine was backwards, and then worked his way back to the start!! Are you confused?!!)
Just like on Where Is Love, Knife Of Life builds to an emotional climax as we modulate keys at the very end. This was always a super-emotional thing for me to sing. It hurt and required lots of air in the lungs, but it was also exhilarating to perform.
When we finally hit the end of the song, there is a screeching, fed-back noise that fades into the distance over some unmentionable dissonance under it. I'm quite sure that entire moment was created by recording violin through the 480L processor. Our friend Darren Walters (who is still one of my best friends and, with whom I still perform music with) played the violin on this. When we debuted the album live, Darren came up out of the audience during the crazy middle part of this song playing violin for us.
I'm sure I'm leaving out some major details, so if I think of any, I'll make sure to post a post-script!!
Whew!
Ian - June 16/09
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