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I started up EmbracingFate.com in an effort to get rid of my YouTube, MySpace, ReverbNation and DeviantART pages. I wanted it all on one page and I wanted a fresh start in doing so. Naturally I wanted to use some new music for the site and I had an idea... What if I just made some improv songs to put up in the player until I could write some real music? Funeral Of A Demon, Aven-Jo, Prepare, Itinerary, and of course Son Of Life were the first products to come from the idea and they all went up on the site. Funeral Of A Demon and Aven-Jo had inspired me though. They sounded good. Better than some of the songs I spent time writing and perfecting. And they were easy to make and really fun to play and best of all they had traits that reminded me of The Black Mages and more specifically Nobuo Uematsu. Granted they weren't the best quality but they were my own creations and I was rather proud of them. So after listening to 'em a few more times I decided to make an album out of songs in the same style. But I didn't want to do just an album because the music inspires visuals. Like The Black Mages remake battle music (and other songs) from the Final Fantasy series (and other stuff)... Those songs, written by Uematsu, tell a story when you're playing through the game they belong to and convey emotion and thought. I wanted my songs to do that too, so I thought... What if these songs were connected to a storyline? What if the storyline was audio and part of the album? What if purple were called 'orange'? The idea pretty much came out of nowhere. And so I dubbed the project; The Nightmare Battles. Over the course of the next three months I kept writing songs for the album and thinking about how I wanted the storyline to play out. What I always found interesting was my approach to the storyline. Essentially I just kept writing songs and giving them names based off what I heard when I listened to them. When I finished all of the songs, I wrote the storyline to fit the titles of the songs and basically used the storyline to organize how the songs would appear on the album and make the title work in a way that fit the songs as well. Eight of the songs represent actual battles that take place in the storyline. Four songs represent storyline elements, emotions of the characters, and most importantly thoughts of the main character (Meaning Of The Dream for instance). And I used one song with a catchy, extremely repetitious beat to represent the storyline as a whole, from the main character's point of view; Maddening. When you download the album you'll notice that Maddening is track number 00 (double-zero). This is because if the album were released on an actual CD I would've had Maddening as a hidden track at the beginning, before the first song. This technique was used on Final Fantasy VII - Reunion Tracks to put a song before the first track on the album (an instrumental version of One-Winged Angel). Also the 'songs only' version of The Nightmare Battles does not have Maddening in it. My friends helped me a lot with the album. Not the music, but with keeping my spirits up and inspiring me, and most importantly just listening to the songs when I finished them to give their opinions. I'd like to thank them here; Brooke, Andrew, Sid, Carole, my guitar teacher Hugh, his grandson and my former guitar teacher and long time friend Allen, and John. Another friend I need to thank is Nate. If it wasn't for him being around, my sort of creative leverage in everything I do (at the time), I don't think The Nightmare Battles would ever have been finished or turned out half as good. I always felt the need to impress him the way his art impresses me. Of course now that he's a lazy bitch, I don't care so much. Where's the hobo Nate? Where's the hobo... |