Chapter 1, When There Once Was Life to Come (Spoken)

I don't remember the day or the precise moment
But when I finished high school and
I was still stretching my fingers as far as they could go
To play like Jimi Hendrix, my hero, I realised, wait these songs of his
Some of them they're written by Bob Dylan
Maybe I should be listening to that guy more
It was Dylan's Times They Are A Changin' and
Leonard Cohen's Songs From A Room that
Eventually inspired me to write songs that really spoke to the listener
Immediacy with a single guitar and a voice

The moment had arrived
We were about to record my debut solo album Sleeping Patterns
The producers Jeff Lang and Tim Hall had brought the studio band
Around to my house for the final run through before we hit
Adelphia Studios first thing the next morning
I remember I did have a bottle of whiskey that I was sipping
To try and knock out the sniffles of a cold before the big day
And Jeff had said Go easy on that mate
I seem to recall I did take it easy
But I woke up the day of feeling terrible
My throat was already raspy and congested before I sung a single note
But no way was I going to cancel the sessions
I'd been waiting a long time for this my whole life really
And the crew had flown in from around the country for this so we powered through

As a nod to Leonard Cohen I knew I had to play
A nylon string guitar for the song, 'When There Once Was Life To Come'
I was very much influenced by him in the writing of this
Writing a little less about my own feelings and teenage angst
Of yearning for love in all the wrong places
This was a song very much inspired by realising the world was fragile
The people the animals the plants the rivers it was all vulnerable
And we as humans were the cause of much of this
I'd always had a healthy dose of fear when it came to the idea of death
And even more so of the world itself one day ceasing to exist
But what would I say if I made it through alive? even after the world had ended

I think for me writing a song as a fairytale, a fable, from a God-like perspective
Where I was able to rush forward in time to the end of humanity and back again
Gave me some sense of relief, of control
I don't think I really appreciated back then that what I was doing was
Making a coping mechanism for my neurotic thought patterns
My day dreams and fantasies of catastrophic events occurring all around me
While I somehow survived
This would be a constant theme that would haunt me in my dreams and
Then infiltrate my song lyrics for years to come
Giant tidal waves alien invasions and Nuclear War
You know the usual stuff

The day I tracked the original recording was maybe day 3?
And my voice by this time was almost completely gone
Unlike the other songs many of which I went back to the engineer's studio
Months later to re-track vocals
We decided my voice on this was perfectly suited in a thematic sense
For what I was trying to achieve
I sounded about 50 years older than I was
And the theme of post apocalyptic nothingness
Got that extra dose of drama from my worn out tone

Now in the reimagined version of the song with Lollies
All we knew was we wanted a driving monotonous tension of a sound
Like a 'warning signal' 'an alarm'
The Casio keyboard and the hi-strung guitar play this role
From the intro on we didn't know
Where it would take us Take 1 is what you hear
And it's very different from the original