Into Thy Hands Song By Song #9 Title Track

Song #9: Into Thy Hands

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

Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #8 Knife Of Life

Song #8: Knife of Life

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

Where Is Love EXTRA!!

On my way to a rehearsal today, I listened to Into Thy Hands, or as I've been calling it lately, "Into Thy Price Range!"

I caught another funny vocal faux pas in Where Is Love that I simply HAD to post here on The Awakening blog!!!

My line about always ending up in a "whore" was funny... but just a few lines later I said another nonsequitor - "Just how long must I wait to find some understanding here?"

The way I sing HERE, it sure sounds like I'm wondering if I'll ever have UNDERSTANDING HAIR!!!

Too much!!

Anyway... back to our regularly scheduled programming!

Ian - June 16/09

Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #7 Where Is Love

Song #7: Where Is Love?

Words: Ian Tanner

Music: Ian Tanner, Mike Powell and Andrew Horrocks

The intro to this song is one of the rare times the DX7IIFD had some positive use! The growling sound and the melody line during that intro all came from one patch, so it was nice to be able to do this live and have it sound just like the album. I also really enjoy the feedback that occurs as the intro awkwardly, and intentionally modulates from Db to Dm.

A bit of history.

This song was started by Mike Powell as a home recording of his own. I remember going to where he lived at the time in 1987, and spending an evening on 2 of his new songs, this one and Knife Of Life. We later brought our rough 4 track demo to practice and started making the song happen as a group. It's been too long for me to remember who actually wrote what, but I'm pretty sure the chord structure and the weird bass part were all Mike's invention. The melody might be mine, although it does sound similar to other songs Mike had written melodies for at the time. The chords and melody in the chorus sound a lot like something I would have written, so it's possible that all Mike had when we got together was an intro and a verse. I know for sure that the middle section with those WHOAS again (!) was written by Andy.

The production of this song began what became a somewhat magical second half of the album. It was our intention early on in the production to have the second half flow together without gaps between songs, like the newly released Sgt. Pepper CD. So it added a more artistic overview to every song that ended up on side 2 - (I know, CD's don't have sides! Whatever!)

I'm pretty sure there is grand piano following the bass part in the verses, and it also plays throughout the meandering ending. It was nice using a real grand piano, since it was already at the studio waiting to be used!

One funny thing I can re-tell is something I noticed after I sang the lead vocal. During verse 2, I get all worked up and sing this emotional line, "it seems when things are going great, I end up in a hole!" The problem is, no matter how many times I've heard this song, I always hear the last phrase as "I end up in a whore" just because of my stylized vocal! I'm pretty sure at subsequent live shows, that I went out of my way to pronounce that line clearly and correctly!

The ending of the song was quite a bit of work. The military sounding drum stuff at the end was actually done electronically. Rick Hutt ran Mike's snare through the very expensive processing unit called the 480L, which was THE ultimate studio reverb/effects tool of the era, and upwards of $10,000. Amazing how things have changed! You can get a good reverb out of Garageband these days for virtually nothing!

The vocal collage at the end was a time consuming affair. Andy and I always liked these complex vocal arrangements, where you'd swear 3 or 4 separate pieces were all happening at the same time. I don't think we cared too much whether people could make out which of the lines was supposed to be the focal point. It was just supposed to be dense and then as the song faded out, celestial.

The song credits say that it is dedicated to "A.K." It took me awhile to remember who those initials represented, and then it finally came to me. There was a Jazz musician I had played with at around this time who was pretty severely messed up. He was insane from being ultra creative, but also from his heavy drug-use, and not just the soft drugs that, even at that time would have been completely blown out of proportion by me. I guess I felt it important to write something about the possible inward story going on inside this guy, how he was feeling lost and confused and was looking for answers in the wrong places. I could now say the same thing about myself back then, minus the drug use!!

All that said, I'm still really moved by this song. Many elements on the 2nd half of the album bring back moments of sincere pleasure and emotion for me, and the end of Where Is Love is one of those moments.

Ian - June 16/09

Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #6 - Lonely Place

Song #6 - Lonely Place

Words: Ian Tanner, Rick Hutt, Jeff Moseley (and Ted Acorn)

Music: Ian Tanner and Andrew Horrocks

This is a song I mentioned in an earlier blog, that dates back to my very early days as a Christian. I was still in high school when I wrote this song. It was called "Wait For The Lord." As I mentioned, I brought this song to Andy in the early days and for a little while, it was part of our setlist, but eventually got dropped to make way for better songs.

Our preliminary demos, that Reunion Records heard before production of Into Thy Hands, left them feeling that there was no obvious single in any of the songs we had submitted. (We submitted over 20 songs!) Knowing this, we began to look for existing material that might meet the radio-friendly criteria that Reunion was looking to satisfy. I pulled Wait For The Lord out of the dungeon, and when Reunion heard it, they immediately suggested that we re-think the song and give it a make-over.

Andy was instrumental in getting the song away from its original sound, that being a sappy, Rhodes-laced adult ballad. Putting acoustic guitars in place of the Rhodes really brought the song into a new light, so we pressed on and made it happen.

Lyrically, this song was torture. My original words for Wait For The Lord were as amateur as you'd expect from someone writing their first song as a newborn Christian! I recall, that the bulk of the new words were written in the front foyer of Cedartree Studio in the very first days of album production. Jeff Moseley, the A&R rep from Reunion was with us at this time, so we sat in the front area of the studio brainstorming possible lyrics. The words were credited to Jeff, our producer Rick Hutt and to me, but I'm sure that everybody had a say in the matter. I'm pretty sure Andy and Al were suggesting lines too.

One contribution that was not legally accounted for, but DID make the album credits, was the contribution of our dear friend Ted Acorn. Ted was our lighting manager, and also owned the house that Mike, Al and I moved into as room-mates. Ted was older than we were, and on the road, he had to put up with a lot of annoying immaturity, but he was a great guy. (When he got married in 1989, he of course, booted us all out of his house!!) Ted was the one who suggested one crucial line of the lyric, "till Jesus comes." None of us could think of any appropriate line for this exposed part of the song, until Ted offered his input.

Now, if you remember, I recently mentioned what I consider 2 key ingredients to the success of The Awakening's songs, one being the WHOAS, and the other being a 4 note melody.

Lonely Place is where that lovely 4 note melody started, and I will now attempt to showcase the many places where that 4 note melody would pop up its head!! The notes were G, F#, D, A. Those are the notes of the bridge melody, "His truth can be found, in a lonely place..."

While this song was still corny and called "Wait For The Lord," we began accidentally re-using that theme in other songs, and after awhile, it became a bit of a joke, so we'd throw it in just for fun.

Here's an incomplete list of songs using that exact theme (often in the exact same key!)

Fireside - the keyboards on the outro

The Only Way - the 2nd half of Andy's guitar solo

Wrestling In The Jungle - "you cannot do a thing TO HELP YOURSELF!!"

Again - "evening takes me far away, from the heart I HAD TODAY" and on and on!

Again - The end of the big guitar solo/cello line, right before last verse

Knife Of Life - keyboard line in middle of chorus 2

That's all I can recall, but I'm sure we had later material that purposefully or accidentally borrowed that 4 note theme!!

Anyway... onto the production. One distinct memory of I have of this song was the keyboard solo. I remember being very proud of that solo when I did it. It was not easy to perform, as I was using the "never-cheesy (!!)" pitch-bending wheel, and I made constant mistakes every time I tried to nail it! The sound came from the Roland D-50, which really was, in my opinion, the greatest keyboard invention of the 1980's. I don't have one anymore, but on any keyboard work I do these days, I still call upon those lush sounds originally created on the D-50.

But in regards to the choice of sound for THIS solo, well... time has not been so fair!!

Here's how it went down.

We finished the album, waited for it to be manufactured, and then had a big party at Ted's house to debut the album to some of our closest friends. I'll never forget getting to the keyboard solo in this song and hearing one of Mike's friends, who I'll call Steve H. for posterity (!!), make a fairly harsh statement about that keyboard sound. I have no idea what he actually said, but I was really offended by it. How dare he suggest that my hard-working keyboard solo was "lame" sounding or any other negative word he could come up with?!! I thought it was magical, and he thought it was stupid. I was mad about this for a long time, even after he took me aside and apologized for hurting my feelings. (Years later, we've bumped into each other at Starbucks and I'm sure next time we do, I'll bring this memory up and buy him an over-priced Latte to ensure that he knows all is forgiven!!)

As time changes peoples' minds about a lot of things, time has certainly changed my opinion of this 20 second segment of my recorded life. I hear the solo now with the same embarrassment level that Steve must have heard the first time through. But I was still hopelessly lost in the 80's and in the world of Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson, so I was far too un-cool to see how silly that sound really was. A guitar solo would have been far better, or no solo at all.

Oh well... 'twas the 80's!!

One beef I had with the record company regarding this song had to do with the slight lyrical modification at the end of the song. They didn't like the constant repetition of the phrase "Lonely Place" at the end of the song. Saying that we "believed in a lonely place" didn't make any sense to your typically brain-dead radio listener (No offense!) They suggested that we re-phrase it "I believe in a silent place" because Lonely Place was considered too negative.

This song basically went through an insane amount of massaging, and the production was done very carefully to ensure massive radio success. In some ways, it didn't really fit in with the rest of the album, but with the inclusion of "Onward" on side 2, it at least came close to being relevant. After all of this effort, it was a real shame when the song did nothing at radio. I have to believe that Reunion had somewhat lost interest in us by the time the promotion of this album began. Perhaps they had taken just a little too much flack from me and the other guys regarding creative decisions, or perhaps it was because we went over budget and almost didn't deliver the album at all. Whatever it was, this song did not end up being the huge single that would have assured us a 3rd album in the year 1989.

It's sad because, for all the criticism I can give towards this song, it's actually a very nice production and has some really special moments in it. I love the ending. In the barely out of training diapers digital age of CD's, the concept of A Side and B Side was still important even though the medium no longer needed such categorization. Lonely Place ending as it did, provided the perfect sense of "End of Part One" that the album needed.

Ian - June 15/09

Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #5 - Again

Song #5: Again

Words: Al Powell, Ian Tanner

Music: Andrew Horrocks, Al Powell, Ian Tanner and Mike Powell

This song brings one sharp memory to mind, and I'm afraid, it's yet another disappointing factor about this album!!! (Sorry to those of you who accepted the album as it was. We appreciate that fact, but with age in our case, comes the desire to set records straight!!)

Mike Powell had made a comment on one of these recent blog postings, and it nailed an essential error we made in making this album - that being, the fact that the drums were recorded in MONO! Why this was done is not clear to me, although I have my guesses.

As mentioned previously, the drums were initially recorded via Midi drum pads, so that various tweaks could be made to timing errors and dynamics and such. After this long process, Mike brought in his newly acquired Ludwig drumset and began recording real drums over top of the Midi-performed drums. You'd think with going to such hassle to get some sense of real drums on the album that we'd put them in their proper place in the mix - ie. full stereo. But we didn't do this. I can only assume the reason this was not possible was because of the fact that we only had 24 tracks to make available to everything else, and obviously the powers that be felt that nobody would really care too much whether tom fills went from side to side or not. I hope that's not really the case. I'd like to think this was just a massive blunder that was too late to fix, but I honestly don't remember how this came to be.

But the evidence of this screw up is no clearer than on this song, especially at the end, when the tom fills go all over the kit, but sit static, right there in the centre channel!

Aside from that, this was to be one of our most popular songs at live concerts, and was quite often our final tune of the night. Again, those trademark WHOAS helped sell the song to first-time listeners!!

This song was probably written around the same time that most of the others were written, in mid 1987. It obviously started with the initial contribution of Andy's, and then everybody started contributing. I wrote the melody, but Al wrote a good chunk of the lyrics.

I remember doing this song after the album was finished at a big Christian music festival in Canada. We jokingly referred to this as "Blowfest" because it was insanely windy during our day of performance. It was so bad, that we had to have some of our close friends stay on stage holding down Mike's drum kit so that it wouldn't blow off the riser!! I have fond memories of closing the show with this song, and looking back at our friends Harold and Dwayne holding down Mike's kit. Despite being deafened by the close-proximity to Mike's kit, they were singing those WHOAS with reckless abandon! Hopefully they have not suffered any long-term hearing damage as a result!!

Anyway... back to the production!

This was essentially a pretty simple song to produce. The only moment of complexity came during the bridge, just before the solo. Cedartree Studio had suggested we hire a cellist from Toronto named Dick Armin. He had played on the Unforgettable Fire album by U2, so that gave him great credibility! So we scored out a very simple chart for him and had him play on 2 songs. This experience taught me a little something about using "legitimate" musicians on a rock album. The chart was not professional, but I'm pretty sure it was accurate. Dick had trouble playing the simple line in tune with the other instruments. I found this very bizarre. I was in the control room saying, "can't this guy tell he's out of tune??"

So considering how easy the part was for someone of his level, it actually took longer than expected to nail this part. It was a valuable lesson for me, which I would re-experience years later when hiring educated musicians to play music out of their comfort zones. I don't mean to be disrespectful of Mr. Armin. Perhaps he was getting paid an embarrassingly low fee for his work.

The ending of this song was a mistake I wish we could take back. The song had no official ending, although at our pre-album concerts, the song always had a "stadium rock freak out" at the end!! Perhaps we considered that the song should just fade out, but for whatever reasons, we decided the song needed a legit ending where none was ever recorded. Rick Hutt began the task of inventing a free-form sounding ending based on some big Rock fills by Mike. He found some snippets of Mike warming up on his kit and began editing them into some kind of ending. The idea might not have sounded so disconnected from the song had the toms not all been in MONO!!!

When I look back at this album, even before I began re-mastering it so that it sounded good (!), I always look at side 1 as being a bit of a mix-up. Side 2 was always the one that I held up as being some kind of high art, but the first side always seem to pale by comparison. The odd thing is though, some of those first side songs were the ones we played live for the longest time. I think it's just taking the side as a whole where you see some of the cracks in our production.

You'll probably notice that when I start to write blogs about the second half of the album, that I'll be noticeably less negative about the end result.

Thanks for reading and, of course, for listening.

Ian - June 15/09

Into Thy Hands Song By Song: Song #4 - Thoughtful

Song #4: Thoughtful

Words and Music by Ian Tanner

I mentioned in a previous posting that this song happened accidentally, during a break from soundcheck, while playing a great, older guitar Andy was borrowing from a friend!!

There's not much to tell about this song other than the fact that the guitar voicings were considered a bit "off" when Andy first learned them. I was typically snobby and insisted that Andy play the chords the way I played them, and that he NOT find "better" ways to voice those chords. The open strings were SUPPOSED to create tension and lack of gender in the chords!

I freely admit that those chords were the way they were because I didn't know what the hell I was doing as a guitar player back then! These days, I would probably never write anything like this because I know too many things about the guitar fretboard to get all curious and experimental again. That's why this song is special to me in retrospect.

Unlike the total lack of bass on "Don't Wait For Me," this song got a nice, full sound out of the bass for the final mix. Sadly though, and I hate to be so negative all the time (!!), but it's a real shame that the core acoustic guitar track sounds so "plugged in" and synthetic!! Andy, at that time was playing a Takamine acoustic/electric guitar, and I suspect it was recorded DIRECT and not acoustically. The guitar probably had a lousy acoustic sound and worked best when used plugged in, but wow... what a thin, crummy sounding acoustic guitar! I'd love to hear this song recorded on a really nice guitar, through a beautiful, expensive ribbon microphone! Oh well, it's for the ages I guess!!

From a songwriting perspective, I remember running into a slight snag creatively. The melody at the end of the verse didn't seem familiar to me when I wrote it, but by the time we started recording it, it suddenly occurred to me that it was a note for note copy of a song that MADONNA had used in one of her hits at the time!! I was mortified!! From that point on, I tried to change the way it was sung. What's worse is, I think the words were even exactly the same! "It burns inside of me." I forget the name of the Madonna song, but it was one of the first Madonna songs I remember hearing and thinking, "wow, this is actually a really, really great song!" It was from a movie she did perhaps with Sean Penn. Anybody remember?!

Anyway... so I changed the melody slightly on "it burns inside of me" to prevent myself from accidentally stealing from the lovely Madonna!

Lyrically, I was still trying to cram a lot of cutesy intelligence into the words, and sometimes it worked, like on the lines "Memories crying, ocean sighed" and "and now my eyes are weak, my tears begin to speak." The "no drowning souls in lakes of fire" may have been a little over-the-top, but we were oh so serious back in the 80's!!

I also love the vibe of the middle section. I'm pretty sure some of those dreamy keyboards in this section were played by Glenn Koehler, our manager during these days. This was done when I had had enough of being at the studio and invited Glenn to come in and do my job for me! It's one of the few times where there is some actual space in the recording.

Ian - June 14/09