already home from memoirs by drumfish

When we were going through our song list to decide on which songs to use on “Memoirs” a number of factors came into play. A lot of it had to do with the lyrical content and how the 10 songs would fit together to make a cohesive work. Some of it had to do with the style of the song and some ...of it was just our opinion of which songs were the best. Once we narrowed down to about 15 songs we started making mock lineups to see how the songs would work together including segues and the overall flow. Track ordering became an important factor. We began to notice some patterns emerging in the way the key signatures of the songs and mimicked some of the predominant harmonic structures heard in the individual tracks.

One of the main harmonic themes on the record is to start in the home key and then move to the 6th scale degree. We do this in 4 or 5 different ways on the record but you can hear this happening over and over. We began to align the songs in an order such that the keys of the songs would line up in the same way. The record starts in D for the first two songs and then the third song is in B-flat minor….again 1 to 6. In fact if you line up the keys for the entire record, it makes a progression very similar to what a lot of the individual songs are doing. It even goes full circle and arrives back at D for the last song, “Remember”.

Another pattern that we saw emerging was that a lot of the songs aligned very closely with Alex’s numerology work (for more on this see the back stories for “Flood” and “No Hesitation”). The numbers 1 through 9 can be place on a circle moving around clockwise. 9 is just to the left of 1 and could also be represented with a 0. The number 9 in this way represents returning back to the beginning or back home, the starting point. And so this track “Already Home” became track 9. Other songs on the record have similar stories about placement due to the track numbering.

In addition to the song keys and numerical meanings, the songs were placed in order for lyrical reasons as well. In “Already Home” our protagonist has just gone through a very difficult emotional experience in “All For You”. He has passed through his long journey of transformation and has emerged changed. Through a moment of acceptance forced upon him by the nightmarish intensity reached in “All For You”, he realizes that what he searched for throughout his journey was already within himself the whole time and in this way he has connected with the source of his own life. He now understands that he is “Already Home”.

Facebook