The stories behind Rocking.grs The Absolute Guide To Progressive Metal: rocking.gr/articles/en/The-stories-behind-Absolute-Guide-To-Progressive-Metal/17299/ Daniel Gildenlow: Pain Of Salvation - Remedy Lane This is by far the fastest album from start to finish in our entire discography. We were asked to join Dream Theater on their European tour in 2002, and we were told by our label that we needed an album done by then. This was, by many standards (and especially by ours), an impossible task. I remember trying to find my way into envisioning a new album, but never really finding footing. This was late 2001 and me and my wife Johanna had seen a very tough year together, and this took a lot of my time and focus. I think it might have been my getting drunk one night and writing Undertow in basically the amount of time it takes to play it, including almost all of the lyrics. I think thats what opened up the idea for the album. If it wasnt, then hell, it should have been because that makes most sense. Anyway, that gave birth to the idea of using all this shit that was clogging my system and make that the album. After this decision, in an intuitive and fierce process, I wrote the entire album and we recorded it - all in a matter of a few weeks. And, everyone who saw us on that tour know that we indeed made the deadline, against all odds. Creatively, this may have been the path of least resistance, but emotionally, I am still paying a high price for this album. Partly because, when I perform songs from this album, I get pulled back to that place. But also because, turning my own experiences into a product, and tweaking it here and there, I have in a way lost my personal and unique connection to these experiences and memories. They have become Pain Of Salvation and Remedy Lane. And that is a loss. Its like having this song from your childhood that pulls you back there when you hear it, but you know that every time you repeat it, the magic fades, like a cassette tape that has been played too many times. By this time we felt at home in the studio down in Malmoe, and had taken to working late nights on our own, recording. And more of our relaxed experimenting from the rehearsal room entered the recordings. The weird sound before the first verse in Trace of Blood is a plastic toy that I grabbed before entering the vocal booth. I never thought it would survive to the finished product. For one of the songs, I smuggled a tambourine into the vocal booth, and kept it hidden and dead still while singing most of the track. When I suddenly started to play it loudly in the last chorus, everyone broke down in fits of laughter in the control room, half because of the surprise and half because I had waited for so long. Looking back, I think the severity of the concept made those vents necessary, especially for me.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Feb 2014 14:36:41 +0000