God Made A Mistake

“Austin, you are not a mistake. God did not make a mistake” 

Thanks guys. I know. But also, can’t I have a little fun with the lyrics? 

1 - The Undertaking! is not a REDACTED. I’ve talked about this at length in different areas, specially in my conversation with REDACTED. I haven’t been invited back, by the way. 

2 - Writing lyrics is one of the trickiest things I do. I’ve had to explain to people that… lyrics are typically an exaggeration. A larger than life approach to situations or social commentary. There aren’t literally witches doing a seance on my front yard, but it’s a fun way of saying the devil is trying to lure us into temptation. I’m not actually walking on a tight rope, hoping to fall… but it worked better in the song than saying “wide is the path that leads to destruction” one, because Becoming The Archetype already said that and two, I liked it. 

3 - Forever Remember - I’ve already wrote about it a bit but I’ll try to expand on it a little bit. The song ended up being about self-doubt. Wahoo I didn’t write a song about death this time. It’s about self-doubt. Thinking you aren’t meant to have nice things. Feeling like “yea, of course bad things happen to me” because… “something was bound to go terribly wrong.” Fun fact - that line was actually used in a different song that died. I wanted to name a song that as a spiritual twin to “And Everything Worked Out Just Fine” but those idea got scrapped. Also, Thrice said it and also, Every Time I Die said it in a song. I hate writing lyrics and then hearing them in other songs. Sometimes you change the lyrics. Sometimes you don’t.

BACK TO THE SONG: I’m attaching a screenshot of one of my notes from this song. Typically, Johnny, Brent, Keith and Dan will pass demos around and once one is ready for vocals, I’ll head over the Brents. I try to come prepared with an outline of a song, what I wanna do in certain spots, lines that go with certain riffs. Throughout the process, I’ll steal from other sections and then re-write lines to fit better (cadences, syllables, rhymes, etc). In this case, it looks like I took a lot of ideas from this one paragraph. I try really hard not to delete lyrics, by the way, so if something doesn’t get used for a song, I’ll just drop it lower in the note. You never know when you want to bring something back!!! Don’t delete anything! 

I finally landed on my Screwtape Structure and that helped unlock the song for me. The POV is someone exclaiming “hey… things aren’t going well! uhhhh, society is falling apart….” And then the POV turns to the devil on their shoulder and says “hey, I hear you whispering in my ear. I don’t care about you. I don’t need you.” The whisper that this Wormwood is speaking out is “God made a mistake. YOU are a mistake.” The POV acknowledges that they were once happy but then they gave this devil a little bit of influence in their life. 

Ugh - I hate explaining songs. Just go listen and tell me what you think. I listed the lyrics in one of last week’s newsletters. 

4 - All Smiles is next. Get your fake smiles ready. October 24, I think. 

5 - Limp Bizkit released a new song. I wrote this newsletter listening to chocolate star fish. That’s two Tuesday newsletters in a row that have mentioned that album. Should I try for three next week? Go listen to their new song. its hilarious.

Song of the Week

No… the song of the week isn’t limp bizkit.