Well, the first part that is Cursed Valentine was written way back in 2009 and it was the first time that I had written lyrics that were pretty different from what I conventionally wrote back then.
Things changed after that. I strayed from the conventional way and preferred expressing everything in the way they deserved to be expressed. That way I felt I gave justice to the vibe under which the songs were written... until my next project.
The next project that I worked on was called "Renaissance". Well, as the name suggested, I got back to the conventional way and wrote stuff that were insane and aggro-rock based. Following that I worked on "Applied Conditions". This project was a small one and consisted of ballads. It was a very soothing project.
Well, after that I took a drastic turn. In terms of humanity :towards the worse, in terms of writing: turned out in my favour. I wrote a very dark project. Actually, I surprised myself on completing it. It had a different level of darkness and it was unlike any other project I had worked on - "Engraved Damnation". To give you a hint, one of the ideas that I worked on was named "Hell's a reflection away". It was a project which I wouldn’t prefer looking or listening to at the hour of the dead i.e 3am - 4am.
"When the divide" was the next project I worked on. Well, this was a very happy go lucky project. It had been a while since I had written typical rock songs and so, I stuck to writing simple rock songs.
After walking through all these projects, it was exhausting when I had to think which direction to go towards with respect to the next project. And so, I just left it to "fate" and let things happen their own sweet way.
Sometime later, I started writing. Whatever came to my mind. At first I thought I was taking the conventional way. But I didn’t stray from the process I had started following and just continued writing. After a while, I sat back and just read through what I had written. Well, I surprised myself again. I had not written anything like that before (or so I thought). This entire work had a very dark and personal theme - unlike anything I had written. Yes, it was dark but it didn’t have the darkness of "Engraved Damnation". This darkness was more of personal and each idea could be related to the common folk. I was just wondering that how did this come to be. I mean, I had not expected this. Not that I was disappointed, I was left blank. Because just as I had thought that all roads had been exhausted, a new road came to be.
Then came the twist.
I was just walking through all that I had worked on till date and I saw that the underlying theme of the ongoing project took inspirations from a project I had worked on 6 years earlier. Cursed Valentine was a personal record but 6 years ago, the personal feelings were different. What made me angry back then was different from what made me angry now.
So, the template was of a similar plate but the material was totally different. Cursed Valentine was aggressive and personal. This material was personal, aggressive and most importantly - it was very dark. Because it had a long distant relative, I thought it would be right to call it "Cursed Valentine II" because had I written Cursed Valentine now, it would have sounded this way.
Anyways, back to the process. I had around 15-20 ideas ready to record and then select the top 12. This didn’t happen. I started recording but by the time I had recorded 5 ideas, I wrote 2-3 more which were equally good and belonged to the same family. This process kept on happening until I had recorded 10 songs. By the time I had finished recording vocals for 10 tracks, the count of lyrics rose from 20 to 32. I gave up!!!!
I finalized that until I am exhausted of ideas with respect to this project, I wont proceed. And so, the working process continued.
A few weeks, actually months later, the threshold had been reached. I stopped at 48. It didn’t end there. Now came the difficult part - selecting the best. I had 48 tracks which shared the same parent - "Cursed Valentine II" but only 12 could be adopted. That was almost like I had to dump 75% of the stuff.
Well, it was tuff…. Very tuff…..
But after weeks of filtering, I could get from 48 to 18 ideas and it was impossible to get lesser than that. These 18 were the best tracks I had written till now and each of them could be a story of any person across the globe. Since I liked going off the edge with respect to every project I worked on, I decided to keep the 18 and divide them into two parts based on the theme they shared. That wasn’t very difficult.
Now, the recording began. To be honest, out of the 10 tracks I had recorded earlier, only 3 made it to the top 18.
Out here, I would like to be specific with respect to one track - "Turned into waste". This is important as it would explain how difficult it was to get this record over with.
This was a track I had written while back. It had a very gloomy vibe and was a very dark track. I recorded it the very next day on my phone and trust me when I tell this, the melody of the track is to date on of my favourite. The problem happened when I went to record this in the studio. I must have recorded this atleast 15 times but not even once could I get the vibe that I had captured while recording it on my phone. I mean, I would record and listen to it and I would find it good but when I would compare it with the recording on the phone, the latter would sound much better and I would walk back to the booth to re record it. After trying to record it for 15 times, I gave up and finally I got the phone recording mixed and filtered and that made it to the original mix.
After completing the recording, I listened to the mix and I was shocked. Generally I have one or two tracks which are of the metal core base. This project had six metal core tracks and each of them were blistering, dark and well, insanely personal. But after listening to the project from the beginning to the end, it was the greatest feeling. It was a project that at a point of time had lost track and I had no idea when it would get completed. Well, finally it did get completed and I can confidently say that this was the most difficult, out of the way and definitely the best project I worked on.
Well, just as a teaser as to how dark the project was - one of the track is named "Antichrist".
But I had fun. Because I broke all the boundaries which I had set up for myself and totally ripped the process I had been following all this while and paved a new direction for the projects I may likely work on in the coming future.
Ciao
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