Song dissection: Terracentric

At the time of writing, I thought that Terracentric was one of the best songs I had written so far. It was one of the last songs that were written for Brainforest. It sounded like a hit song, and I was pretty pumped about it. It does have many of the characteristics that still define my songs. Listening to it now, I think that there are some pretty weird harmonic choices in the backing vocals of the chorus. I still like the main melody, but the harmonies are a bit out of whack. Gladly, now I have more knowledgeable people around me, helping me to get such things right.

Terracentric stayed in our live set for a long time, until it was replaced with better songs of the same style. I think that “The Completionist” is from the same branch of songs – the more uptempo, energetic pop songs. I probably have about four or five types of songs that I like to write.

The lyrical themes of Terracentric defined much of the look and style of Brainforest. I designed the whole cover art and the entire booklet to show visions from that world. Evil corporations, conspiracies, secret operations and well-guarded headquarters were a big inspiration, and continue to be. I’ve always been fascinated by secrecy and greed for power.

Terracentric has one of those scifi lyrics that I like to write. Everything is a lie is another early take on writing completely fictional lyrics, which don’t have anything to do with my personal life. There will be plenty of science fiction in our upcoming songs as well (The end of all debates and Nerve cells for example). Override was less of a scifi record – Mother of all bombs is probably the closest thing to a scifi song, and even that takes place on a secret tritium processing facility. Transplant features two songs of the scifi breed: Extinction and Wargame. Our band photos have always been taken in places that resemble scenes of these scifi stories, and that has sometimes been a problem, because we’ve been categorized as a very niche kind of band, which we definitely don’t want to be. When we released our latest song, Dust on the shelves, the imagery was radically different from what we’ve done in the past. Making that move felt hard, but also liberating. I want to paint with lots of colors.

We’ve had some talks about updating old songs to match our current music production standards, but it always seems more interesting to work on new songs instead. Terracentric could definitely benefit from such renovations, but I doubt that I will ever prioritise old songs over new ones.

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