Part 3 of our THTH trilogy!

Ugly 

This is me pissed off. Pissed off at everyone, pissed off at the world, but most of all just pissed at myself. I think it’s about rejection in essence though. Especially in the music business 95% of the time you hear the word ’No’. Or you simply just don’t hear anything at all. It’s incredibly difficult to catch a break and that fact will easily frustrate most people. I guess that’s why most bands quit after just a few years of only uphill battle. I suppose there’s a case to be made that it’s just not worth the 5% of time when being in a band trying to get places is actually fun. 

I don’t want to complain though, because I’ve settled into doing things at my own pace. But that won’t stop me from filing a complaint in the guise of a song, ha! 

Anyway, screw whatever feelings of inadequacy I deal with in the lyrics, this song is just a beast live! It’s crazy how much this one fuels you up and you just want to kick shit to pieces. It’s also very taxing to perform and because of that it’s usually the set closer. 

 

The Bear 

Bit of a secret favourite maybe? It’s less of a grand gesture than the other songs on the album. It’s definitely the folkiest song on the album if you ask me. People who’ve heard the song have asked if the story about the bear is an analogy and I always tell them no. It’s just about a bear out in the wilderness, confronted with people from time to time and finally going berserk at the loss of its cub. Yeah, you can draw parallels and analogies to our lives easily enough but that was never my intention when writing the song. 

I always wanted it to be on the album . Especially debut albums tend to be a first Greatest Hits of sorts because of the amount of years the bands usually have had time to develop their sound and songs, an amount of years that you almost never get between future albums. But I never wanted this album to just be a ’single after single’ kind of playlist but also have a bit of depth. Sure, ’The Undertaker’ and ’A Song For The Hills’ lend that as well, but their still kind of heavy in their appearance. And ’The Bear’ is not heavy at all, bar part of the lyrics, and is more of a trip than the other songs. Not the song you catch yourself humming along to after you’ve finished the album. But a song that’ll keep pleasantly surprising you with its layers listen after listen. Well, here’s hoping anyway! 

 

Homesick 

I always picture this song playing over the end credits of a cool little indie film. The title gives away exactly what it’s about, so no need to dive in more deeply there. Would’ve been easy to make this a huge bombastic affair with drums, strings and whatnot. The song totally lends itself to that kind of treatment. But that always felt half-hearted to me. And so I took upon myself the more challenging task of doing way less with it but still achieving the same kind of emotional response as with the Hollywood production. I like how it turned out in the end. 

 

Life In The Service Of Others 

Now while ’Homesick’ would be such an obvious album closer, I always try to fight the obvious to a certain extent. And so I decided early on I didn’t want to close the album with a down tempo song. Instead I thought it’d be fun to close with a song where I scream my lungs out in the bridge before the last chorus. So here you go. 

Lyrically I suppose you could say this is a traditional protest folk song about working for the Man. Musically it’s probably the song that’s changed the least over the years. It’s one of the oldest ones on the record but I’ve always enjoyed it regardless of all the new songs I’d written. On top of that, I kind of like the idea of making a statement at the end of the album stating clearly ”this is where the roots are”, this is how it all began. I wrote it around the same time as ’Beggar Princess’ and ’Trail of Lies’ from our first EP and both those songs went through massive changes until they were recorded. This one just didn’t. It’s our roots song, I guess.