Wax-work Theme E (Endless Wax-work) - 09-02-02

Well... this sure was something. Lot to talk about this time. First off, I'm back to ending up with something other than I intended. My concept was to do a pretentious English New Wave song, but once I started coming up with chord progressions, I switched over to Prog Rock. The music side was influenced by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer as well as a tiny bit of Jesus Christ Superstar. For the lyrics, I went with a more ELP thing, a sort of post apocalyptic tale. The tale the lyrics tell is sort of inspired by Drip-Your-Own-Wax; it's about how mankind is gone because they all dropped their "Wax Bombs" which coat everything with wax. So everyone is dead but all the people, animals, plants, buildings and everything are preserved under a sheet of wax. I wrote the drums and 'bass guitar' part on Encore and had my computer play them, then I played the synth bass and organ parts myself- hence the solo suckage. Then, when I went to record the vocals, I realized they were too high for me. So I sang them down six steps and transposed them up. The resulting high voice sounds... really weird, but it's better than the version where I moved myself up 3 steps and the music down 3. Then, just messing around, I thought it might be interesting to throw in an ELP's Palmer (the P) style drum solo by just scrolling through the drum staff in encore with my mouse. It was sort of cool, sort of not, I could not decide whether I should keep it, until I hit upon the idea to make the entire song a 'live' recording. The audience is taken from the first few seconds of my Nirvana Unplugged CD. I think making it live made the song a lot better. Now my crappy playing seems less crappy.

*Remastered 05-26-08 - I also decided to save the non-live remaster of the song as well. So, if you ever wanted to hear the song without the audience cheering... now you can!
Wax-work Theme E (Studio Mix)