#this album is epic and now i think i like it even more than i did before (and i already loved it before. truly)

[seaofreverie]

GUUUYYUYSSSD !!!!!

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

KIMONO MY HOUSE VINYL!!!!!!

Also funny story which is that when my brother took these to the cashier he said something like "oh... Sparks... they were here one year ago"

[earlycuntsets]

"DEATH COMES RIPPING" - SPOOKY ISSUE

'THE BLACK PARADE, THE TRIUMPHANT NEW ALBUM BY MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE MAY HAVE A TRAGIC STORYLINE, BUT IT'S NOTHING COMPARED WITH WHAT THE BANDMATES ENDURED TO BRING THE DISC TO LIGHT

PHOTOS BY JON WIEDERHORN PHOTOS BY JUSTIN BORUCKI

STANDING ON A BALCONY nine floors above the teeming streets of New York, Gerard Way overlooks the city in which My Chemical Romance began assembling their ambitious new album, The Black Parade. The newly peroxide- blond frontman takes a deep drag from a cigarette and exhales with a sigh. He knows he shouldn't smoke, but it's his only remaining vice.

"If I hadn't been sober, I think The Black Parade surely would have killed me," says Gerard, who climbed on the wagon in 2004. "We were going insane the whole time, and I had to cling to my sobriety to stay even a little lucid. The album became like this beast that was consuming us."

Following up a release as successful as 2004's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, which sold 1.4 million copies in the U.S. alone, is never an easy task. And the various scares the band experienced as they worked on the new record-drummer Bob Bryar had a near-fatal staph infection, Gerard seriously injured his foot, and some restless spirits at the studio where they recorded kept them all on edge-did not help matters. And neither

did MCR's decision to make The Black Parade (Reprise) a concept disc. Together, Gerard and his bandmates-Bryar, guitarists Frank lero and Ray Toro, and bassist Mikey Way (Gerard's younger brother)-decided to craft a record about a dying young man who is visited by a cast of strange characters that help him examine his short life.

But diving into the conceptual deep end proved well worth the hassle. The Black Parade is not only MCR's most realized offering; it's also one of the most eclectic, enjoyable rock records of the year. One listen to tracks

like "House of Wolves," "The Sharpest Lives," and "Dead!" makes it clear that My Chemical Romance can still rip a good metallic punk tune. But the bandmates are now equally influenced by epic albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall, David Bowie's The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, and Queen's A Night at the Opera.

"A lot of bands from the scene we came from try to strip down their music to 'keep it real," Gerard notes. "But the real you is what you've always had inside you and what you strive to be. So when we started compiling the material we had written, we were like, You know what? This has to be a huge, theatrical record."

MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE started working on ideas for The Black Parade in the back of the bus while on 2005's Warped Tour, after which they flew to New York and rented a rehearsal space for two months. And that's when things started to get weird.

"I was living in Queens, and I had to commute on the subway every day," Gerard says. "I was suddenly very scared and paranoid. I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you're trying to work on a record. And I had no anonymity because there were a lot of teenagers on the train." In reaction to the young fans he encountered on the underground,

Gerard wrote "Teenagers," a T. Rex-style romp with the chorus line, "Teenagers scare the living shit out of me." "The song came directly from commuting when school let out and being so terrified of them," the singer says. "I was like, Wait a minute. These are the same people that listen to our band. Why am I scared? And I realized it was because they're scared, too. Teenagers are made to feel like they can only solve their problems with violence. They lash out at each other in a really volatile way." After several months experiencing the joys of mass transit, MCR had completed only a handful of songs and felt like a change of scenery (and climate) might do them some good. "I couldn't keep working in New York," says Gerard. "We wanted isolation."

id: Gerard leads the way to what will likely be the band's second platinum record

So the group relocated to Paramour Mansion, outside of L.A. Nestled high in the hills, the deluxe estate overlooks the trendy Silver Lake area and boasts spacious rooms, a gorgeous pool, lush gardens, a state-of-the-art recording facility-and a few special guests.

"The place is definitely haunted," Gerard says. "Doors would slam, and the faucets would turn on. You'd get a bath drawn for you of freezing-cold water in your room, and you wouldn't know why." As unnerving as its mischievous spirits could be, the Paramour was also inspiring, and contributed to the haunting vibe of songs like "The End" and "This Is How I Disappear." More important, it led Gerard to come up with the bleak, surreal concept for the record. "I would have these night terrors, where it would feel like someone was choking me, and my heart would stop and I would stop breathing," he says. "I would wake up in the middle of the night and write these notes to myself, and one of them read, 'We are all just a black parade.' So I started thinking about how this band is kind of a black parade, like a funeral-procession rock thing. And I used that idea to piece together this story about the idea that when you die, death comes for you however you want." Gerard molded his concept into a narrative about a character he dubbed the Patient, whose strongest memory from childhood is of his father taking him to the city to see a parade. Two songs into the album, he dies, and the black parade comes for him.

"During the rest of the story, he meets this entity of death and all these characters, like Mama, who represents anyone who's ever lost their son in a war," Gerard explains. "It's almost like these Canterbury Tales, where he goes along on this journey, and at the end he decides whether he wants to live or die." With the concept in place, My Chem made the songs as sweeping and theatrical as Gerard's lyrics. They accomplished this, in part, by combing through their own eclectic record collections and pulling choice elements that would set them even further apart from other melodic punk bands.

The first two minutes of "Welcome to the Black Parade" stemmed from Gerard's love for Broadway musicals, the horns in "Dead!" came from Mikey's interest in Blur and Britpop, and the jaunty feel of "Mama" was informed by Tom Waits and Nick Cave. But the most poignant moment on the record, "Cancer," was (unlike its morbid moniker) something of a pleasant surprise. "I was very upset about something in my personal life, and that's when that song came out," Gerard says. "It was really spontaneous, and it was recorded pretty much live with Rob [Cavallo, the record's producer] on the piano and me in the vocal booth. Then we added layers of drums, which gave it a certain urgency. It's the song I'm most proud of because it was the most pure emotion we've ever captured, and it gets such an immediate response. You can't shake what the song is about."

As the CD approached completion, some members of the band began to show signs of nervous exhaustion. The group was scheduled to fly to England to play the Reading Festival, and as the date grew near, Toro, who has a fear of flying, got noticeably agitated. Then, after the band tracked "Welcome to the Black Parade," which was originally called "The Five of Us Are Dying," the guitarist lost it.

"I thought I had this premonition," Toro explains. "I was flipping through the TV channels, and on the news. there would be something about a plane crash, and every time I woke up in the morning, the clock would say 9:11. I was playing Tomb Raider the night before the flight, and on the level I ended up at, there was this whole flashback to a plane crash. So right before the flight I was like, 'That's it. I'm not flying."

Despite his misgivings, Toro boarded the plane, and when My Chemical Romance returned to L.A. (all of them still very much alive, thank you very much), The Black Parade was completed without further incident. Listening back to the record, the band members were in awe of what they had achieved and eager to share it with their fans. "There was a real confidence that came to us," Gerard explains. "Having survived it, we felt like we were changed forever. I feel different as a performer now, and I think we really finally discovered who we were as a band." But just because MCR were done with the record didn't mean that it was done with them. About a month later, the band was shooting a video for "Famous Last Words" with director Samuel Bayer (Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins) on a set featuring walls of flame, when-seized by the moment-lero grabbed Gerard's throat from behind and wrestled him to the ground. The singer rolled one way; his foot went the other. "It bent completely backwards, and I heard a crack and felt this agonizing pain," Gerard recalls. "I tore all the ligaments in my foot, but I got up and continued to perform." "I didn't know what I was doing," says lero, shaking his head. "I wasn't trying to hurt him. I felt awful. I still do." Gerard's injury was serious, and he still walks with a cane, but it paled in comparison to what happened to Bryar. At the end of the shoot, the pyro was so intense, the drummer could feel his leg burning, but he stuck it out for the rest of the song. By then, he had a nasty third-degree burn. And the misfortune didn't stop there. Bryar didn't take his antibiotics regularly, and he failed to keep the wound clean. By the time the band got back from a brief tour of Japan, the burn was severely infected. Then Bryar's face swelled up and, after doing the MTV Video Music Awards preshow telecast and a special club show, stumbled into a hospital emergency room in intense pain. "I thought I'd be there for 10 minutes, but as soon as they saw me, they got all serious and gave me an IV and said they had to do a CAT scan," recalls Bryar."They did all these blood tests and kept me there for 14 hours." Doctors discovered that Bryar's leg infection had spread to his blood and caused an abscess in his face that was creeping dangerously close to his brain. If it had been left untreated for another two days, he could have died. "The whole thing was such a nightmare," Bryar says. "This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube. Then he went in and out of the inside of my mouth with the needle about 10 times. Fortunately, the treatment worked, and Bryar left the hospital three days later. With tragedy averted, My Chem are now focusing on touring for The Black Parade. They'll be in Europe for most of November, and when they get back at the end of year, they'll start rehearsing for a U.S. arena tour that starts in February. "We want to put on a full show with props and staging like The Wall," Gerard says. And MCR plan to keep the Patient alive long after they're done touring for the CD. "I would love to see the story turned into a play or a musical, and it could easily be a movie," enthuses Gerard. "Making this record, we cut ourselves open every day, pulled out every organ, and lay them on a table so it would be something we're completely happy with. We want The Black Parade to exist for a long time." "The whole hole thing nightmare. This doctor stuck my cheek with a needle about six inches long and the width of an IV tube." -BOB BRYAR

"I felt more like an outsider than I ever had, and I had no confidence, which is bad when you're trying work on a record."

-GERARD WAY

12/2006 revolver - mcrhollywood on flickr

[hmsdoodlin]

(22) Heart and Soul <3

Long ramble under the cut

I’ll be honest I have no idea why these two resonate so much with me, they barely interact in the album one on one. But I think they’re really cute and I’m kissing them on the tops of their heads. They have so much potential.

(Please don’t crucify me for any of this, I acknowledge that some of my takes may be ooc. This is all based on interpretation and whimsy. Soul is hard for me to characterize.)

My version of Soul is tired. He’s driven to drastic decisions that he does not want to do. He loves his Heart and his Mind with his entire being just as much as he hates them, they’re him! They’re a package deal! But in Cacophony Heart and Mind are far too absorbed with their rivalry to really acknowledge him unless it’s to turn the argument in their favor. He feels ostracized and used, more like something to be fought over than a friend. I think he’s really lonely.

And then you have Heart. Someone who yearns to be understood but struggles to express himself in a healthy way. He craves for unity just as much as Soul and Mind do, but ultimately crumbles beneath his own perception of the others and his loathing. He wants to love, he has the capacity to if he is the entire emotion spectrum, he just can’t express it right now because of everything going on inside his head.

Soul really needs a hug and to feel loved -> Heart really needs a hug and to feel understood

Both are incredibly lonely in their own ways, but they also have the ability to be mutually beneficial for each other in Cacophony.

Assuming Soul is half and half of both sides, he’s able to understand and at least sympathize with Hearts point of view. He doesn’t agree with it, he can see past all of the twisted perceptions, but he’s able to provide the sympathy/understanding that Heart needs. No matter how small. And in turn Heart is able to provide that brief feeling of togetherness and unity. Heart is most likely the easiest to connect with on a surface level, and therefore the best option for when Soul is feeling down and hopeless.

Heart thinks the entire world is against him, he believes that Mind and by extension Soul hate him and want him gone. Soul is able to quell the moons worries, at least for the night. Soul believes that his sides hate him just as much as they hate each other, he wants them all to get along. Heart can provide that feeling of unity, physical touch acting as a form of reassurance and communication. He can pretend that everything is good for a moment and that the warm body beside him is how it’s supposed to be.

I headcanon Mind as touch adverse and Heart as very physical, so Soul is the perfect middle ground! Heart and Soul are able to connect on a very emotional level, and therefore have an easier time showing affection and being close. Lots of cuddles! Lots of comforting! They don’t have to talk, there’s no pressure, they can just hug and everything melts aways. They want to keep each other safe and happy.

Their relationship is so appealing because there’s no barrier between them. They can connect with and understand each other on a very emotional level, switching seamlessly between comforter and comfortee in most scenarios.

I have a lot to say about them in an angst sense, but it delves a bit too far into headcanons and is incredibly long. That’s a discussion for another time, I’m trying to focus on the positives of their dynamic here. Heart and Soul angst absolutely cooks though, trust.

I may be delusional. But in my HEART and in my SOUL they are very close. They share the same night sky! The moon orbits the earth and controls the tides! You can only see the stars when it’s night time!!!!

(Quickly going to clarify that I personally accept a lot of different interpretations of Hearts blindness as canon, I generally like and accept most headcanons even if they conflict with eachother. Soul blinded Heart? Cool. Mind blinded Heart? Epic. Heart was always blind? Awesome. I personally don’t really care and I think all of them can be true simultaneously. Why the hell not, time does not exist on a linear scale. I don’t agree with Soul being 100% an abuser though, he’s just as much of a complicated victim as the other two.

I personally like the idea that Heart did it to himself in apathy the most. Doodle Heart has subscribed to that, as will all/most of my interpretations of him. My Soul didn’t hurt him in that way. And I think he was actually quite mortified when he found out.)

Be silly be goofy, do whatever the hell you want, at the end of the day this is my own personal point of view. They swim in my brain like little amoeba and have rerouted all my nerves. I’m definitely more inclined to be soft on them so take everything I’ve said with a grain of salt. My ass is biased. On my hands and knees begging for more content of them though. PLEASE.

On a less serious note. I think Heart is Souls little guy. He love him :(

[olderthannetfic]

Of course people are being defensive, Spotify Anon. You rolled into the Fandom Old corner of Tumblr to tell us to examine our biases based on a streaming platform that only half of us even use at all.

Someome compared it to the f/f wank and they're right. If you accuse people of bullshit based on completely ufounded speculation, half of them will block you and the other half will explain to you why you're wrong. And we can't block other people's anons, so you're just going to have to endure a barrage of "this is bullshit and here's why". You asked for this, this is us examining the racial bias in our spotify wrapped and going "huh, it can't show bias if it doesn't exist" or "how does the fact that I listen to weird non-American music you've never heard of say anything about my feelings about the personhood and rights of American popstars I've never heard of?"

--

Spotify wrapped season is really popular broadly (though not so much around here) to the point that I find it very annoying since you apparently have to download the app to see wrapped??? I hate this season every year.

I use spotify via a browser, grudgingly, because some friends' fun guess-the-song stuff is on there. I had to use it at the fertility clinic because that's what they use to play music while injecting you with eggs. (I picked Mono if anyone is curious, but given how insanely painful being inflated with saline was, I should probably have picked D-2. I just thought it wasn't available because Spotify used to NOT FUCKING HAVE most of BTS' side projects because Spotify sucks donkey balls. Have I mentioned lately how much I resent the ubiquity of this piece of garbage? Have I?)

The thing that gets me that I hadn't quite worked out until just now is that 100 songs is the precise right amount to feel huge and significant without actually being so. Top 100 albums or artists is still an illusion of knowing what someone listens to. (Spotify has been improving, but they still routinely don't have the stuff I want.) But at least there, by the time you get to my 100th most listened to artist for a year, you might have some kind of picture of what I listen to.

Now, if you only listen to prog rock on vinyl, maybe your top 100 songs represent about 50 albums. >:D But let's say you're listening to some modern albums with bonus tracks and shit on Spotify. Your top 100 might be March When I Broke Up And Listened To The Same Five Albums Day And Night. No matter how diverse and interesting the rest of your musical diet, your bland-ass breakup playlist is now ninety out of one hundred songs on your Spotify Wrapped for this year.

I think it's that previously not totally conscious thought about how many 100 songs really is that was annoying me until just now.

Sure, it's just one scenario, but I think this sense of what 100 songs means is what's really annoying me about how people go on about Wrapped. Not just here and about racism: All the mainstream blathering about Wrapped annoys the shit out of me too every damn year.

It's a little like kudos. The top 200-500 most kudosed things in a big fandom may well show some pattern I find interesting. The top 100 most kudosed things show that people like that daily updating omegaverse crossover ship epic with Tony Stark.

Okay, okay, with kudos, you could probably exclude the top 10-30 depending on fandom size, but you know what I mean. Your last 100 fics read mean little, IMO. Your last 100 fandoms read, which is likely to be significantly more than 100 fics, is interesting to me.

It's my usual Numbers Are Deceptive complaint about how people love stats but do not contextualize things well.

[desmon1995]

Zippity Zow! The Wacky Comeback of the Concept Album.

With the news that both LMM and Eisa Davis are going to be spending this year predominantly working on the Broadway adaptation of the Warriors concept album, it's gotten me to really think about the art of the concept album.

A concept album isn’t just a collection of songs—it’s a complete story, woven together through lyrics, sounds, and recurring motifs. Unlike your average soundtrack, which often serves as a backdrop, a concept album invites you to dive deeper, asking why certain choices were made and how the musicality enhances the narrative. Once a celebrated art form, the concept album has become a rarity, a fading craft that challenges listeners to experience music as more than just entertainment, but as an intricate and intentional work of storytelling.

It’s a real loss, especially when you consider Broadway’s deep ties to the concept album—a format that has given us some of theater’s most groundbreaking works. *Jesus Christ Superstar* began as a concept album, with Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice experimenting to see if heavy metal could thrive in a theatrical setting. *Hamilton* was nearly released as a concept album before it transformed into a full-scale musical. And *Hadestown,* now a beloved Broadway classic, started as a raw, evocative concept album that laid the groundwork for its stage success. The concept album has long been a proving ground for innovation in musical theater, making its decline all the more bittersweet.

One of the beauties of a concept album is the freedom it gives you to imagine the story however you like, offering a level of creative engagement that most other mediums can’t match. This is especially evident in fan-made animatics, such as those inspired by Hamilton or more recently Epic: The Musical. These animatics use the songs as a foundation, enhancing them with stunning animation and storyboarding to bring new dimensions to the narrative. In some ways, this approach can achieve things that a traditional Broadway production can’t, unshackled from the constraints of budget or practicality, allowing the story to soar in ways limited only by imagination.

The reassuring thing is that at least thanks to the after mention epic and the grand topic of this thesis, the Warriors concept album it seems like the idea is at least being introduced to a newer generation of people.

One of the things I love most about The Warriors is how the cast is constantly reused in inventive ways, adding layers to the story through subtle connections. For example, Sasha Hushings, who plays Cowgirl, also provides the stepping for the Griffs during Lady Cyrus's introduction, seamlessly blending roles.

Another standout detail is Elan from the Hurricanes, whose haunting voice warns, “Folks go missing at the park at night.” Not only does this emphasize the impact the Hurricanes left on the Warriors, but it also foreshadows Ajax's downfall and Fox's eventual fate.

There’s also the chilling moment in Derailed, where Lin-Manuel Miranda, Colman Domingo, Lin’s sons, and the actors voicing the other gangs become the eerie screams of the converted—a haunting touch that amplifies the tension.

Even the cops’ distinctive “Yooo-Hooo” whistle serves a dual purpose: it mimics the sound of police sirens and symbolizes their taunting, predatory nature, making them feel like hunters circling their prey. These layers of detail elevate the experience, making the world of The Warriors feel immersive and meticulously crafted.

I could go on about the little intricacies, but I think you guys get my drift.

It's going to be really fulfilling to see the Warriors come to life on stage considering the film is known for its visual finesse, however I am going to miss that element of imagination you get by just imagining how things play out especially since we've been stuck with the album for a little over several months now.

[aliciavance4228]

Now that the musical is officially complete, what are your thoughts on Epic? I’m curious to see your analysis.

I didn't prepare any essay, therefore I will try to verbalize my thoughts and organize them in the best way possible.

Epic's Odysseus is completely different compared to Homer's Odysseus. Jorge explained in one of his videos that throughout his journey Odysseus has to learn that ruthlessness is necessary if he wants to see his wife and son again. Odysseus from the Iliad and Odyssey never really puts himself morality questions or has an inner conflict with himself. He commited war crimes, enslaved people (and consequently killed them), murdered a baby he wasn't even forced to kill in the first place etc. Eventually you could say that the ten years journey "humbled" him and made him a better person, and even this idea is headscratching.

There are two aspects from the entire Album which dissapointed me and I would gladly change them:

a) The moment when he tells Circe that he cannot sleep with her because he loves his wife too much, and she's like "Okay, then let me help you!" Circe was the daughter of Helios and a powerful goddess, not just some ordinary chick he could've avoided whenever he wanted to. The moment he arrives on her island he finds himself in a position of inferiority, and is treated in a similar way a woman or a slave from where he comes would be treated. He cannot simply refuse her nor do anything against her without consequences, and yet the album failed to show the power imbalance between them two and made it look as if Odysseus from the original ancient poems could've simply said no and that's it. The subject becomes way more complicated when you think about male victims, and how rape or SA towards them still isn't taken seriously.

2) The moment he fought with Poseidon. A mortal cannot physically fight with a god and win unless they receive divine intervention. Diomedes was helped by Athena when he fought Ares. Perseus received Hera's blessing when he fought Dionysus. The only guy who managed to effortlessly wrestle a god was Heracles, because dude was basically steroids on legs. Not to mention that physical strenght wasn't Odysseus' most helpful, distinctive trait, but his intelligence, cunning and ability to lie. It would've been way more realistic if he would've outsmarted Poseidon, whereas Athena and Hermes would've helped him escape and go back to Ithaca.

There are also other small details, such the fact that they chose the roman version of Scylla's background story, or that they depicted sirens with fish tails instead of bird wings.

Overall I enjoyed the entire musical. I know that adapting an entire epic poem into an album isn't easy and I appreciate the fact that Jorge talked about the differences between EPIC and the Odyssey, as well as explaining why he decided to make them and pointing out that his album shouldn't be used as a source of information at school. There are the small details though that could've made it a compelling adaptation rather than just a good one. 7.5/10.

[protagaster]

Wow.

It's over.

The concept album is anyway, but for now EPIC is all done.

It's been quite a ride, hasn't it everyone?

I don't normally do this, but I wanted to give the biggest and most sincere thank you to Jorge and the rest of Epic's beautiful ensemble, for giving me something more than these songs. They returned my sense of creativity, my motivation to write after so long in a personal slump, and even gave me the chance to make bonds with other like-minded souls.

Because of this musical, and the amazing fandom around it, I was inspired to create my own variation of the Warrior Penelope au, which grew to be so much more popular than I could have ever anticipated! So many of you wait patiently for those fics, some of you commenting under every single one, and you have no idea how much that means to me!

Through the au I got to meet my editor, co-author, and friend @somereaderinblue, and despite not knowing her for too long I already feel such a tight bond with her. Whether we talk about the au itself, our other hyper-fixations, or just chat about the silliest and most mundane of things, it never fails to put a smile on my face. I'm always so happy to have gotten the chance to know you. Thank you so much, Blue, for everything. Truly.

And I could never leave out my favorite resident artist, @zippyskyfalls. I first met Zippy not too long ago as well, also because of this au, and it has been such a fun and wild ride since! Talking to you has truly been the highlight of my day at times. Sometimes, when I felt myself feeling small, thinking that the war!pen au may not have been such a good idea after all, I just look at their creations and that feeling disappears soon after. Thank you Zippy, I know you will continue to shine bright, my muse.

And thank you to all of you, who follow my humble blog! Whether you have been here from the beginning or are joining in for the ride, know that you all contribute to our niche corner of the fandom just with your presence! I love you all, and I hope to continue making you proud <3

And...yeah! Sorry for my rambling, I'm just a little emotional rn. EPIC brought us all together, and I can't wait to see where we and Jorge go from here!

Keep on being amazing, my fellow neurodivergents! Let us never stop being weird together ~ 💜

[lisaiese]

lyrics in EPIC: the musical that changed my life trajectory

I don't know if it is the fact that I spent five years of high school studying Latin and Greek classics that makes me do this, but here I am writing a long ass tumblr post about some lyrics from the songs of a musical based on The Odyssey, the Homeric epic poem.

Enough chit chat, let's start from the lyrics in the first very song of the musical, 'The Horse and The Infant' from The Troy Saga:

The blood on your hands is something you won't lose All you can choose is whose

UGH so good already! Here we have Zeus speaking at the end of the song, basically telling Odysseus that killing in war is his duty as a man and a hero. This obviously kind of sounds like bullshit for us, but we have to understand the ancient culture behind it: in ancient Greece going to war was a symbol of honor. Think of the scene where Hector and Andromache met again, Hector really embodied the "I know that I probably won't come back to you and to our son (opsie), but I have to go"

Andromache said: “Dearest, your own great strength will be your death, and you have no pity on your little son, nor on me, ill-starred, who soon must be your widow…Please take pity upon me then, stay here on the rampart, that you may not leave your child an orphan, your wife a widow.” Hector responded: “All these things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting.”

A key word is shame: many times my professor told us students about the 'shame culture' in ancient Greece, which Hector clearly refers to here. Therefore, it's either honor or shame: for the Greek dying in war was better than living like a coward. Through these lyrics - and also the next song of the album ('Just a Man') - we can notice how the characterization of Odysseus is different from that of heroes like Hector and Achilles: he seems more human. After all, it is no coincidence that he is characterized not only by physical strength but above all by intelligence: he is a 'Warrior of the Mind' (quoting one of the most iconic songs of the musical). In the first verse of The Odyssey, Homer calls Odysseus πολύτροπος, a term that literally means "of many turns" and can be translated as multifaceted, versatile, cunning.

Next lyrics are from 'Remember Them' from The Cyclops Saga:

What good would killing do? When mercy is a skill More of this world could learn to use

I chose these lyrics for two reason:

they are so well connected with the first ones and show how Odysseus still has his morality here (you have a long way my friend)

it is such a good phrase honestly, let's appreciate it

Actually, something to reflect on could be the theme of mercy, but I don't really remember a lot of information about it and I don't want to write about things I'm not so sure about. In fact, what I rememeber pretty well is mercy related to the Roman/Latin culture, in particular to the figure of Ceasar: Cicero attributes to Caesar the virtue of clementia, which is the term used in Latin to represent mercy. Apparently he is the only one who, among all the military leaders, stood out for his goodness of soul, so noble that it is not enough to simply compare him to great men, but he must be judged similar to a god («haec qui faciat, non ego eum cum summis viris comparo, sed simillimum deo iudico»). That's basically everything I can give you about the topic. I would dive into it more by talking about the musical itself, analysing how this is connected to Odysseus' relationship with his morality, but then I would really be writing an essay here and now, which would ruin the order and logic of this very long text.

Let's move on to the next lyrics from 'Ruthlessness', from The Ocean Saga, which made me gasp so hard the first I heard them:

You are the worst kind of good 'cause you're not even great A Greek who reeks of false righteousness, that's what I have 'Cause you fight to save lives, but won't kill and don't get the job done

Speechless. Mind-blowing. The earth shook. You are the worst kind of good 'cause you're not even great Hello??? Sorry Ulysses, but Poseidon ate. 'Cause you fight to save lives, but won't kill and don't get the job done Like, where do I even start to talk about this. Poseidon is actually throwing the naked truth in Odysseus' face! Everything so far has a logic:

Zeus tells Odysseus that he has to kill Hector's son Astynax (which he does in the end, for the sake of going home)

Odysseus spares Polyphemus (maybe because of guilt? He is just a man, afterall...)

That mercy results in a literal god (Poseidon) wanting to have vengeance: if Odysseus had been ruthless, he would have put mercy upon himself (yeah that's a direct reference to the lyrics Ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves)

Now we finally arrive at my favorite saga (aaaaa): The Circe saga. Starting from some very simple lyrics, but so impactful, from the 'Puppeteer':

But this was a hell of a twist, cause we are weak to a power like this What was it? A woman

Hell yeah, a woman! Clearly, you are just a man (another reference, got you!). Ok, return to serious talk. I think most of us know that women were often portrayed as bewitchers, source of evil and misfortune, in ancient times, especially in the Greek culture. Let's think about the story of Pandora's box: it is a myth narrated by Hesiod in the poem Works and Days. According to it, the first woman on earth, named Pandora, was gifted a jar by the gods. However, led by curiosity, she opened it and, by doing so, she released sickness, death and many other unspecified evils. She then closed the jar and only one thing was left behind: Hope. This story (one of many and one of the most famous) perfeclty exemplifies how women were considered dangerous and, at the same time, powerful, as bringers of evil.

Next, from the same saga, let me present to you the best lyrics from the song 'There Are Other Ways':

There are many ways of persuasion There are many modes of control Maybe showing one act of kindness Leads to kinder sould down the road

AAAAAAA. Circe you are such *incomprehensible adjectives of praise* woman. Here Circe basically gives Odysseus' morality hope, let me explain: until now we saw how Odysseus' kind soul and his mercy led him to antagonize a god, on the other hand (in theory) killing a child opened the doors for him to return home. From these observations the only "lesson" that can be deduced is that behaving like a "monster" is better than just "being a man" (yeah I love referencing). BUT Circe kind of destroys this reasoning, proving that a good soul can take him so far... aaaand of course it's a woman who does this

Moving on: The Underworld Saga, lyrics sung by our favorite prophet Tiresias:

I see you wife with a man who is haunting A man with a trail of bodies (who?)

This song? Chills. Literal Chills. The song in itself is a forshadowing, an oracle. I chose these lyrics specifically because they forshadow Odysseus' darkest moments in the journey, by specifically pointing out what he becomes: [...] a man who is haunting A man with a trail of bodies Who? Odysseus you ask. It's you. It's you in the future, and you know why it's "no longer you" (yeah, another quoting)? Because you will have lost your morality by then. Honestly? We kind of all expected that, sorry not sorry Odysseus.

And directly connected to that we have the lyrics from 'Scylla', from The Tunder Saga (it's orange because there is no yellow):

We are the same, you and I, I

Just this one final verse, so powerful. Odysseus encountered mermaids and was merciless with them, after that he went to the lair of Scylla. They are actually the same: monsters. Or at least, Odysseus has become like her.

And now, in The Wisdom Saga, we welcome back the badass of the arena: Athena! Let's hear what she wisely says in 'Little Wolf':

One young wolf has a larger heart than all these men combined

It's always the women guys. Athena's appearance to help Telemachus fighting the suitors is so crucial: her words and herself gift us that ray of hope and goodness that was lacking ever since The Underworld Saga. Here she refers to Telemachus, Odysseus' son, who is called a young wolf. While at the beginning of the song the suitors were using the term "little wolf" to basically mock him, Athena changes the connotation: he is not a little wolf, he is a just a young wolf, with a good soul and heart. Even a wolf (an animal) is more good-hearted than a man, but here who actually is the animal and who is the man? Athena, a godess, knows best.

Finally, The Vengeance Saga, from which the best song (almost cried listening to it) is, of course, 'Six Hundred Strike':

After everything you've done... ...how will you sleep at night? Next to my wife...

OMG. Literally OMG. Here, at the final showdown between Odysseus and Poseidon, our hero prevails. Poseidon asks: "After everyhting you've done... how will you sleep at night?". I don't know if my interpretation is right, but this is what I think Poseidon meant with his words:

after everything you've done (and been through) to get here... how will you sleep at night? -> will the trauma spare you?

after everything you've done as you became a monster... how will you sleep at night? -> will the guilt spare you?

And Odysseus just answers with a "Next to my wife", because that's what he wanted from the very beginning, to come home, and he will achieve his goal. His story is the story of a journey: obviously, a journey back home, but most importantly, a journey of someone who is 'Just a Man' (got you again with the reference). Odysseus is just a man, a human being who has encountered countless obstacles, who has had his ups and downs, who has thrown his morality into the sea to return home. And what is this, if not life?

[oceanpulls]

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – best friends and Nine Inch Nails bandmates – found unlikely creative fulfilment (and a couple of Oscars) by reassessing what they had to offer as musicians. Now they’re thinking even bigger, and imagining an artistic empire of their own making

By Zach Baron

Photography by Danielle Levitt

Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday to Friday, 11am to 7pm. “We show up,” Reznor told me. “We’re not late. We’re not coming in to start to fuck around.” It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor could not have foreseen in the ’90s, when he was fronting Nine Inch Nails and struggling with a drug-and-alcohol problem that was his answer to success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I’d rewire the studio 50 times.”

Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children, and multiple jobs. He is sober. Since 2010, when the director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to score The Social Network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, the two men have had steady employment composing for film. This year, Reznor and Ross are also starting a yet-to-be-named company, built around storytelling in multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a venture with Epic Games.

And then, of course, there is the oldest and perhaps still the most complicated of Reznor’s jobs: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988 Reznor formed what was then a one-man band; the first two full-length records Nine Inch Nails released, Pretty Hate Machine(1989) and The Downward Spiral (1994), have sold more than eight million copies. (Over subsequent years and subsequent albums, the band has since crossed the 20 million mark in sales.) In the ’90s, for a time, Nine Inch Nails were ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the level of Nirvana or Dr Dre. During that decade, the success of the band nearly killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared to process how disorientating that was,” he said. “How much it can distort your personality.”

These days, Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, present a different problem – how do you make something old, something so already well-defined, new again? There are years when Reznor feels like he has the answers and years when he’s less certain. He has put the band on hiatus more than once; after the last Nine Inch Nails tour, in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing shows as well. “For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure: what’s the tour going to say?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say right now? We can still play those songs real good. Maybe we can come up with a new production. But it wasn’t screaming at me: this is what to do right now.”

But he and Ross still come to work, daily, in search of transcendence. “We sit in here every day,” Reznor said. “And a portion of the time organically becomes us just figuring out who we are as people and processing life and a kind of therapy session. And in those endless hours it’s come up: why do we want to do this? And the reason is because we both feel the most in touch with God and fulfilled.”

It is easy to make things when you are a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it is considerably harder, once you’ve got older, and found a way to make things that people like, to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts can also destroy you, and if you make it past that, the sheer blissful regularity of life with money and a family can even you out so thoroughly that there is no friction left to work with. You look inside the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, or it’s a mansion and living inside of it is a person you’re bored of, and so you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross have never stopped looking, and the search for that magical feeling of finding something – that feeling of, in Reznor’s words, “I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know how I just did what I did, but I’ve channelled it into something that worked” – is still the thing that organises their days and their moods.

We were talking in their studio, which was low-lit and cold and full of synthesizers’ blinking lights. Reznor was on a sofa and Ross sat in a chair nearby. The two men first met in the ’90s, when Reznor signed Ross’s band, 12 Rounds, to Reznor’s Nothing Records. Soon after, they became friends, and then musical collaborators. “I was just getting sober,” Reznor said, “and I was in a pretty fragile transitional phase. And I just hit it off with Atticus right off the bat. And part of it was, he was someone who was on much firmer ground, in a mentor-y kind of way, than I was.”

Ross is two years younger than Reznor, but when they met, he’d already been through certain things Reznor was just getting around to. “I got clean when I was very young,” Ross told me. “So I had a bit more experience than him. Put it like this: I knew you could have fun without being high.”

Their friendship has been a constant in both their lives since. “I don’t know if parts of us are broken and we don’t feel good enough,” Reznor said, staring at the ceiling of the studio, “but we know if we work as hard as we can and do the best work we can, it fixes something. At the core of it, that’s what unites us creatively. On top of that, I think his take on the world and role in life helps me understand my place and not feel as detached in some ways.”

Reznor often jokes, or simply explains, that he is a “quart low” on whatever it is that makes people happy. “I think we can both, on our own devices, run below zero as a baseline,” Reznor said. “I don’t mean manic depression, I just mean we don’t take compliments well. It’s like when we won the Oscar, it was the day after: ‘Let’s take today guilt-free, kind of say fuck yeah.’ And tomorrow we’ll have settled back down to a few feet below sea level.”

In their years of collaborating with each other, both men have found some mutual reassurance – a little lift. Reznor gestured at Ross.

“I remember something he said to me – I don’t know if you want me to say this or not – in one of our talks years ago: ‘Here’s what I want today.’”

“I see what’s coming,” Ross said, nervously.

“I just want to feel OK,” Reznor said, quoting his friend. “I want to feel like I’m OK.”

One day this winter, Reznor greeted me at the door of their studio – in the course of reporting this story, I never saw him anywhere else – wearing a black hoodie made by the synthesizer company Moog, black jeans, and black running shoes. At 58, Reznor still retains the angular intensity and jet-black hair of his youth, but time and fatherhood seem to have made him quicker to smile. He looks a little like a college professor now, or an unusually-well-cared-for software engineer. He led me back, past walls of unused gear and several black-clad mannequins, all of which startled me, to their primary workspace, where Ross – a tall west Londoner (he grew up in Ladbroke Grove) with a stern face and a pleasantly reedy voice – sat at a computer, also all in black. (Once, I asked the two men whether their upcoming clothing line would feature any colour. “No,” Reznor said, incredulously. “Of course not.”)

They were on deadline for two films at the moment, including Luca Guadagnino’s forthcoming Queer. “But we’re trying not to work,” Reznor said, drily. Leaned up against one wall was a photo of the two in tuxedos, accepting the Academy Award for best original score for their work on The Social Network. Reznor had contributed to soundtracks before, in the ’90s, but he’d never formally scored a film until The Social Network.

But Reznor and Ross quickly realised that the work, in some ways, wasn’t so different from songwriting. “What do we do when we write a song?” Reznor asked. “We’re trying to emotionally connect with somebody.” Take the Mark Zuckerberg character in The Social Network:“Here’s somebody who thinks this idea is so important that it’s worth kind of fucking your friends over for it. And then realising maybe it wasn’t worth it, or I didn’t realise how I’d feel if I got what I wanted at the price of this. I can relate to that in my own language. Suddenly there’s music.”

“I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor said. “I couldn’t have predicted that I would feel this level of fulfilment.”

And Reznor found that he enjoyed the exercise of solving someone else’s problems instead of his own. “There’s something about not being the boss and working again in service to something that I initially felt guilty for feeling kind of fulfilled by in a weird way.”

Reznor said that on another Fincher film, Mank, the director suggested: “What if it sounded like maybe inspired by Bernard Herrmann and as if it were recorded in 1935 and this film canister sat on the shelf for 60 years?” OK, interesting. (Ross and Reznor were nominated for that one too.)

On the first film the two men scored for Guadagnino, Bones and All, “we got a cut of that that was nearly four hours long with no music and we kind of thought, Oh, fuck,” Reznor said. “Four hours we sat without a pee break, transfixed. It didn’t need music. And when you watch that you approach it differently.” Then Guadagnino brought them Challengers, due for worldwide release in April. Reznor said, “He started us down a path, saying, ‘What if it was very loud techno music through the whole film?’” (This is exactly what it turned out to be.)

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to do.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

They liked the challenge of scoring, they found, and that feeling of not being in control. They also liked the way it made them crave being in control again: “It makes you more inspired to work on other stuff when we’re finished,” Reznor said. “Even if it’s just, Thank God it’s done now and we can appreciate the freedom we had before we gave it up.”

These days, Reznor and Ross also like having jobs that let them be at home, around their families. Both men had tumultuous or lonely lives when they were younger; both men have found that fatherhood soothes certain unresolved aspects of their pasts. Ross has three kids, and “probably the greatest reward is how balanced and happy they all are compared to – certainly my growing up was an unusual sort of scenario. It was a fairly chaotic youth.” Ross comes from a notable English family, but his immediate lineage was more unstable. “My dad had a club called Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace in LA in the ’70s,” Ross told me. “He went bankrupt in England and had a judgment passed against him where he couldn’t talk to a bank manager for 15 years. So he moved here and opened this sort of Studio 54 on roller skates on La Cienega and Santa Monica.” Ross held up a coffee-table book full of photos of the club. “You don’t need to look at it, but it was just a mad life. So I grew up in some madness.”

It is particularly endearing to see Reznor, who at a distance was a fierce and terrifying figure in his 20s and 30s, find domestic bliss. I am old enough that my adolescence coincided neatly with the S&M-flavoured, I wanna fuck you like an animal era of Nine Inch Nails; when I was leaving Reznor’s house one day, I noted with some amusement the cheerful mundanity of a basketball hoop in the backyard. “I’m grateful not to be as angry and frustrated and desperate as I have felt in the past,” Reznor told me. “I couldn’t have predicted that there was a world where I would have a sizeable family with kids and feel the level of fulfilment and comfort and be able to live in that.”

Was that something you were consciously seeking before you found it?

“I think I had some abandonment issues from my parents splitting up, or feeling I never fit in, and I’d gotten accustomed to being on my own. And largely due to my own, I think, inability to really be intimate with people, or share or be open or know how to be a friend or a partner to somebody… Trying that out and doing it with pure and full immersion has led to an unexpectedly great outcome.”

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The other film project Reznor and Ross were on deadline for was Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a science-fiction thriller starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. They were working on a lengthy, music-dependent scene that they’d already mostly scored. But, Ross said, “the director wants it to be a bit more, I can’t think of a better word than just a bit more scary and intense.” They weren’t sure what that directive meant, exactly, but they were content – they were happy – to try to figure it out: to enter the room once again, carrying nothing, and to try to leave it with something that didn’t exist before.

Ross called up the scene on a monitor at the centre of a long mixing board: Teller and Taylor-Joy in an evil-looking spiky forest. Reznor and Ross have somewhat fluid roles in their collaboration, but today the plan was for Reznor to improvise some music while Ross edited and manipulated it in real time. “Atticus’ superpower,” Reznor said, “is that I can come up with a melody and a chord change, and he can make that sit on the scene in a way that is meticulous, and mind-numbingly boring to watch him do.”

A studio assistant, also in all black, presented himself to help Reznor set up a microphone and a cello next to a keyboard that sat underneath another computer monitor. Ross hit play on the footage and what they’d already completed of the score, a kind of haunted, chanting murmur. “It’s basically atmosphere at the moment,” Ross said. Next to him was a synthesizer whose make and model he asked me not to print and which the two men use as a kind of sound ecosystem to feed stuff into.

Reznor began by pushing down on the piano’s keyboard, while with his other hand he manipulated the sound with a flat synthesizer on the desk in front of him. It began as a kind of mellow pan flute thing, and then, with a push of a few buttons, became more of a sad, Social Network-ish plonk. Ross stood up and started tapping the synthesizer to his left, and the sounds Reznor made began to loop and accumulate – little melodic figures that plunged in and out of feedback. Reznor moved from the piano to the microphone, where he sang a few soft passages in a baritone falsetto, more sad than spooky, and then to the cello, which he played slowly and choppily. Ross moved between the computer and the synthesizer, trying to harness it all as it built to a loud, echoing crescendo.

After about 20 minutes, Reznor sat back in his chair, and Ross soon followed suit. Everything got quiet again. “It’s going fishing,” Reznor said to me, shrugging. “Sometimes something happens.”

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Or, sometimes, everything happens. One of the first things you see when you arrive at Reznor’s home studio are two original paintings by the Yorkshire artist Russell Mills – on the left, a razor against a rusty red background; on the right, a decaying yellow-and-black collage – that ultimately became the insert and the cover art for Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This is the record with “Hurt” and “Closer” on it. It’s an album Reznor nearly didn’t survive.

Why do I bring this up? Well. If I may, for a moment, sound like the ageing dude in a black T-shirt leaning against the back wall of a bar where you’re just trying to be young and free of recitations of what the year 1994 felt like, there was a different quality to the way things would happen in music. Bands would labour for years, unknown, and then just get struck by lightning, is the best way I can put it: one day, you’re just a guy, and then one radio station plays your song, and then every radio station plays your song, and everyone is listening to those radio stations, because there is nothing else to do, and then MTV loops your video, and everyone watches it because, again, there is nothing else to do, and all of a sudden you are known by millions of bored people in a way that doesn’t quite happen now. This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but here Reznor is, one of the very few people who have experienced the thing I’m describing. I thought: let’s just ask him what that was like.

Reznor said, OK, he could tell me exactly what it felt like. He gave me a single moment: Woodstock ’94, which Nine Inch Nails almost didn’t play – “it seemed like it was going to be gross, to be honest with you” – but ultimately did. “And when we got there, it was terrifying,” Reznor said. “It was way bigger than I pictured in my head and walking on stage. But this is the point of the story: I knew. You could feel like you were in the right place at the right time.”

In retrospect, how did you handle success?

“Had a drink. That’s what sent me down the path. I wasn’t the guy that, you know, at 12 years old cracked a beer. That wasn’t it at all. Just, I feel anxious around people. I’m not sure how to act, especially now that you’re someone that’s supposed to act a certain way. There’s a projection. It feels uncomfortable to walk down the street and people are looking at you because they recognise you. That’s weird. Suddenly everybody wants to be your friend and you’re the coolest. Everyone wants to date you and shit like that.” Reznor said he found it was “easier to have a beer before I go in that room, and then a couple of beers before I go in that room. And pretty soon over a period of time, wait a minute, things start to get out of control. And you know how the story goes.”

Here’s how the story went: Reznor began to wonder if Trent Reznor could ever live up to the Nine Inch Nails guy that people had in their heads. “The reason I was having to drink was to fix that problem, my own insecurity. But the net result is: I’m not really who I am because now I’ve got drugs or alcohol in my system and I’m not thinking as who I really am. And that comes into focus once one gets sober and has time to reflect and kind of think about what got you there and shit you did.”

Eventually, Reznor got sober, and built himself back up. Today he’s happy to talk about all of it, obviously, but he and Ross have done a lot together since – 10 albums’ worth of Nine Inch Nails (Ross was an official member of the band for five of them), among other things – and Reznor is, by nature, not one to dwell too much on the past of a band that he’s still very much trying to figure out. “We’re not fans of resting on our laurels. We’ve been afraid of thinking about nostalgia. That’s a whole other conversation, but the reality is we’re getting older and our fans are getting older and that’s a fact. And I think, say, during the pandemic, not that you asked this question, but as I’m sure everybody was, I was pretty genuinely freaked out and very clearly came into focus: I’ve got to protect my family.”

He was consumed by fear, by terror of what might happen, of what he might do about it. “I can’t even fit all my kids in a car,” Reznor said. “But in the midst of that anxiety, sitting alone in here, I found comfort in nostalgia. I found comfort looking back at things from my youth that I’ve been afraid to even allow myself to glimpse at because it meant artistic death. Because one has to look forward. One can’t be self-referential. I was so afraid growing up in a little shitty town. I could see people that thought the highlight of their life is junior in high school catching the football. You know what I mean? That’s it. That was the peak. I don’t want to fucking be that person. I could see my fate if I stayed in that town.”

In those moments sitting by yourself, what were you getting nostalgic for?

“I miss parts of living in Pennsylvania. I miss a simpler life that I grew up with. I really loved the first INXS album in 1983. I was a senior in high school, and when I listen to it now I could almost start crying because it fucking reminds me of driving in a shitty fucking car in the summer in Pennsylvania. You know what I mean? Man. I allowed myself to kind of immerse myself in who I was at that time, and what it felt like.”

Reznor had been trying to remake himself ever since he left where he grew up, and now here he is in Los Angeles, over 40 years later. “And I kind of went on a deep dive for a while and allowed myself to realise: I am who I am. And the things that made me weren’t the cool things. I’d always been ashamed of: I came from a shitty town; I didn’t have an exotic upbringing; shitty education, you know what I mean? That’s who I am. I’m not sure what the point of all that confession was.”

Well, except: “It plays into where I’m at now.”

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The last time I saw Reznor and Ross, it was once again in their studio. They were sitting very still. Had they been working before I got there?

“We were for a little bit,” Ross said. “And then nervously thinking about you arriving.”

Really? It’s OK if that’s the truth.

“That’s the truth,” Reznor said. They’d just been in this room for the past weeks, months – years, really, he said. Head down. Working. He gestured at me. “It’s a different mindset.”

And “I was thinking about something you said the other day,” Reznor said. That was on a Friday. I’d asked a somewhat rude question about their soundtrack work, which was: why would Reznor or Ross work for anyone else when they didn’t have to?

Now it was Monday. “I thought about that over the weekend,” Reznor said. “It’s like, Why are we doing this? The idea comes from what we think is a good place of ‘Let’s break it up. Let’s get sent down the rabbit hole on certain things and feel like we’ve got tasks being assigned to us rather than us just blindly seeing what happens creatively.’ ”

But, he said, “I think coming out of a stretch of a number of films in a row, I want some time of seeing where the wind blows versus: there’s a looming date on a calendar coming up and we’d better get our shit together. And certainly in the last few weeks I’ve been itching to do what we often do, which is just come in and let’s start something that we’re not even sure what it’s for.”

Some of that energy, he and Ross said, would probably become the next Nine Inch Nails album. Doing soundtrack work, Reznor said, had “managed to make Nine Inch Nails feel way more exciting than it had been in the past few years. I’d kind of let it atrophy a bit in my mind for a variety of reasons.”

But now, “I do feel excited about starting on the next record,” Ross said. “I think we’re in a place now where we kind of have an idea.”

And then there was the company, which Reznor and Ross spent the last two years putting together, piece by piece, with the help of John Crawford, their longtime art director, and the producer Jonathan Pavesi. The idea was, what could they do that they hadn’t already done around storytelling? Some of that might take the form of examining Nine Inch Nails from yet another angle – “we’ve been working on homegrown IP around Nine Inch Nails, stories we could tell, and we’re working on developing those in a way that are not what you think they’d be.” (As in: not a biopic.) They also have a show in development with Christopher Storer, the creator of The Bear, they said, and a film with the veteran horror director Mike Flanagan.

Reznor put on a pair of black-rimmed glasses so that he could examine a piece of paper next to him. “We just wrote some notes because I knew I’d forget what the fuck I’m about to say.” There was a short film coming with the artist Susanne Deeken. There was a clothing venture, a T-shirt line made in collaboration with a notable designer whose name they’d like to keep secret for now, which will arrive this summer. There was a music festival that they were currently planning, “where we’re going to debut as performing as composers along with a roster of other interesting people,” and a record label, both scheduled to launch around the same time.

And for two years they’ve been working with Epic Games on something that is not exactly a video game, in the UEFN ecosystem Epic has built around Fortnite – “It’s what Zuckerberg was trying to bullshit us into calling the metaverse,” Reznor said. “You can’t say that word any more, but in terms of the tool kit, thinking about it through the lens of what could be possible for artists and experiences, we thought that would be an interesting way to tell a story through that.”

They were nervously contemplating the prospect of having day jobs again, of being responsible for more than just themselves. Early on, as they contemplated launching the company, they’d sat down with David Fincher to ask him about movie production: how does it work? “And he’s like, oh, you’re fucked,” Reznor said. “I can distil a two-hour conversation into that. Because, he said, ‘I know you guys, and no one’s going to care more than you do, and you will not be able to let it go.’”

Reznor has actually had this experience before, of being sucked into a project bigger than Nine Inch Nails and having it take over his entire life. Years ago he worked as an executive, first for Beats and then for Apple, building a streaming-music service.

“Trent was very clear when we started,” Ross said. “We cannot let this get into Apple terrain.”

Reznor laughed. “What I mean by that is – I will make this brief; I’m trying to think through what I’m about to talk shit on. Just to self-censor for a second.”

Reznor paused for a moment and then explained. For years, he said, he’d wondered: what would make a good streaming service? This was before the advent of Spotify in the US or Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, Reznor’s old label boss – later, Iovine would also become Ross’s brother-in-law, after he married Ross’s sister, Liberty, in 2016 – was launching a music service at Beats, which was then acquired by Apple, and Iovine said to Reznor: come try to make this thing a reality. And Reznor surprised himself by saying yes.

“It was a unique opportunity to work at the biggest company in the world at a high level,” Reznor said. “And it was interesting, the scale of the people that you reach through those platforms, just the global amount of influence those platforms can have was exciting. The political situation I was dropped into was not as exciting.”

Reznor enjoyed working with Apple’s design team and its engineering team. “But it made me realise how much I want to be an artist first and foremost.” Reznor also became discouraged with the possibility of fixing the problem that he was trying to solve. “I think the terrible payout of streaming services has mortally wounded a whole tier of artists that make being an artist unsustainable. And it’s great if you’re Drake, and it’s not great if you’re Grizzly Bear. And the reality is: take a look around. We’ve had enough time for the whole ‘All the boats rise’ argument to see they don’t all rise. Those boats rise. These boats don’t. They can’t make money in any means. And I think that’s bad for art. And I thought maybe at Apple there could be influence to pay in a more fair or significant way, because a lot of these services are just a rounding error compared to what comes in elsewhere, unlike Spotify where their whole business is that. But that’s tied to a lot of other political things and label issues, and everyone’s trying to hold onto their little piece of the pie and it is what it is. I also realise, I think that people just want to turn the faucet on and have music come in. They’re not really concerned about all the romantic shit I thought mattered.”

Anyway, Reznor said, turning to Ross, “That was a long-winded way of saying, when we talked about this company, I just said, ‘Be aware of what success might look like because it will turn into something that eats up lots of cycles and time and attention and energy.’ ”

But, Ross said, taking on new responsibilities was, paradoxically, also a way to stay a little younger. “I know we’ve all been talking about being dads and being adults and all that,” Ross said, “and there is a part of me that thinks: it’s important to keep the kid alive.” Meaning the child inside yourself, rather than the one you’re responsible for.

He told a story about him and Reznor visiting the director David Lynch at his house to work with him on the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks. “And I don’t know how old he was at the time,” Ross said, “but he was older. But just walking in there, and he had the room set up and there’s a screen there, there’s some chairs here and there’s some musical instruments there and he’s smoking a cigarette. There’s nothing old about that dude. You know what I mean?”

Lynch showed them some Lynchian footage. It was incredible, even if they didn’t quite know what they were looking at. Lynch was probably 70 or 71 at the time. “But it’s that thing of it doesn’t matter how old he is,” Ross said. “He is alive. It’s that bit of it all that one doesn’t want to lose with age.”

The point was, Reznor said: “Let’s try some stuff. We’re bored. We are. You know what I mean? We’re grateful. We enjoy doing films. We can write a better Nine Inch Nails record, I think. We can put on a cooler tour. We are aimed to do that. But man, what if we try to do that?” Meaning, the company. “What if we could take what we’re good at, like we did with film? We identified something I think we’re good at and we figured out how to apply it to something else. What if we take that theory and try it on some other things? And that’s led us into: we’re not beaten down completely yet. And it feels exciting. That’s what matters to us right now.”

-----------------------

Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu Grooming by Johnny Stuntz using Dior Capture Totale Hyalushot SFX Makeup by Malina Stearns Grills by Alligator Jesus Tailoring by Yelena Travkina Set design by Lizzie Lang at 11th House Agency Produced by Emily O’Meara at JN Production

[putschki1969]

YKL vol.#20～Japanese Seal 20th Special～ Kanagawa Performance Broadcast

2024.06.09 Kanagawa・Kenmin Hall The second concert of this year's Yuki Kajiura live tour was broadcast last night on TBS Channel 1. The tour is titled “Special Japanese Seal” referring to the fact that no Japanese songs are performed. This exclusion does not apply to the encore section. User 蓝原延珠_ on Bilibili kindly provided their recording of the broadcast, you can watch it HERE. I was only able to download a 720p version (~1GB) of it but for the time being, it will do. I am eager to watch it and write a little report. Hopefully an HQ version will pop up in a few days. Without further ado, let's get going〈(•ˇ‿ˇ•)-→

overture〜アンチヒーロー〜Main Theme〜: Right off the bat, I'm noticing that the audio is quite dull and maybe even slightly tinny? Might be the specific recording but it's probably more a matter of the TV broadcasts generally having bad audio. That was clearly noticeable when you compared the Kaji Fes TV broadcast to the BD release. Anyway, we are off to a great start. Glad to see rito and Lino on stage from the get-go and not just for a couple of songs here and there. It always feels a bit awkward for them to have the status of "regular" members but only appearing on stage sporadically. I haven't listened to any songs from the Antihero soundtrack so this is all new to me. Classic YK, the type of song I will always gravitate towards. Beautiful harmonies. Enjoying the slight whine in Eri's voice, so emotional. Love when the epic part starts and you can hear an entire chorus in the background (maybe a bit too much studio magic going on here but I don't mind for grand sections like that). Must have been a real goosebumps moment at the live.

the four rings: Wow, this one is so good. Don't think I've heard it before. Not too familiar with the Heaven’s Feel OST tbh. Really getting goosebumps now. Although I will say that here, the post-editing is a bit overbearing, it seems to almost drown out the vocals of our songstresses. Don't get me wrong, it still sounds amazing and I am enjoying the hell out of it but I wonder how it was like at the venue (with presumably less studio magic). With six singers on stage, they can certainly achieve some powerful choral work but of course it would still pale in comparison to a larger choir. Nonetheless, this is an instant favourite. Hope they will perform it during the Asia tour leg. Although I kinda doubt it since they said that the setlist would be very different. But who knows, it's Fate/stay night so it's probably among the more-likely pieces to be performed among Yuki's huge repertoire. My guess is that they will stick to the most popular anime stuff because they know that will get the audience excited.

absolute configuration: Perfect transition. Never getting tired of this song. And I'm glad we are back to a more natural sound with less studio magic. Solid performance as always.

E.G.O: Have they ever performed this live for a home video release? I don't think so. It was included in one of the live complication albums (Fictionjunction 2010-2013) but I don't recall ever watching a live performance. I have to admit that I haven't even listened to the live audio track, must have dismissed it when I first got the album. I can understand why because it's not really my type of song. It's not bad but not my favourite either. Very old-school YK so that's fun. And there are a couple of nice Keiko parts, that's always a treat.

キッチン革命〜Main Theme〜: A completely new track from one of Yuki's most recent works. Definitely a perfect fit for a show called "Kitchen Revolution" XD Especially the percussion at the beginning. The harmony between Yuriko, Lino and rito works really well, they sound good together. Other than that, it probably won't become one of my favourite songs. Generally not a huge fan of Yuriko as main vocalist. No one does those gorgeous operatic higher harmonies like her but when the spotlight is on her, it's typically not my cup of tea.

voyagers: As far as I know, we only have the studio version and live audio from the compilation album as reference. No official live footage. The song has never really stuck out to me, it is okay but it's a bit too derivative of much better tracks from Yuki. Will keep it short so I don't trigger anyone. But it's definitely one of those songs where I prefer the version with Wakana. Joelle's vocals don't do anything for me here. But since I am not super invested in the song anyway, I can't say I care much.

Historia: opening theme: Beautiful rendition. Love that they brought all six vocalists back on stage for this. Naturally, I'm quite fond of Wakana's version once again (not least of all because this song will always have a connection to Kalafina) but Yuriko does a fanstatic job of singing her parts, admittedly, she has much better control so her voice sounds very crisp and lovely. Joelle provides great support here and their voices blend well together.

forest: Never been a fan. I didn’t like it when Wakana sang it and I don’t like it now that Joelle sings it. It’s not a bad song at all and Joelle sounds fine to me but it’s just not my cup of tea. Next.

My long forgotten cloistered sleep: Now THIS on the other hand I have always loved. I still remember everyone hating Wakana's live version during YKL Vol.#9 but I enjoy it quite a lot. It's true that it's probably not the best she has ever sounded but her vocals here certainly don't warrant all the nasty comments she has received throughout the years for that performance. Of course, I am also obsessed with that WaKei combo!! And you know me, I have a weakness for "lalala"s so this has definitely always been among my favourite YKL songs. As for this performance, I think both Wakana and Joelle are trying are little too hard to emulate Emily Bindiger's timbre. I personally don't think Emily Bindiger has a particularly nice voice so if anyone tries to sound like her, it's always a slight downgrade in my opinion. I'll just say this, if you are one of the people who say that Wakana sounds like a chipmunk in her version, you'll have to say the same thing about Joelle(¬_¬) Long story short, I don't mind this version with Joelle and Keiko. Still very enjoyable. Will definitely be listening to it on repeat.

I swear: Probably one of my least favourite Keiko songs but this is a decent performance. I might even like this more than some of the previous live rendition since it's a bit more delicate(?) I think.

fiction: Another song I could live without…The chorus is solid but it's not one of those songs I'd ever actively listen to.

I reach for the sun: Forever sad that they made Joelle the lead of this song. Keiko does a better job in my opinion and I like the song quite a bit more than "I swear". Overall, the English section has probably been the weakest so far, at least for me. I actually ended up fast-forwarding through most of it.

MC: This MC is quite interesting since Yuki asks her singers to share a story of something they are taking a break from right now. To explain the background of this question, it's a reference to the title of this year's tour: Nihongo Fuin = Japanese Seal ("fuin" basically means to seal up something. You are excluding it/taking a break from it/quitting it/etc). Lino says that despite being a huge lover of the sea, she has been taking a break from going to the beach and swimming in the sea during this summer because it might affect her voice negatively. Yuki has a funny response to that because she says that most of her songs have never really had a summer vibe and actually don't work very well in a summer atmosphere but for some reason, they have ended up always holding their annual tour during the summer time. Keiko has stopped drinking her beloved lattes for the past three months to prioritise her water intake. Gladly, she has overcome the worst parts of quitting already and is getting used to water. Yuki admired her stoic nature. Yuriko would typically refrain from certain things in preparation for a live tour but this year she has completely forgotten about that. About two weeks ago, she decided to quit ice-cream but she only did it half-hardheartedly because it was so hot that she ended up eating it anyway. So yeah, this is a big fail and it's really a "story of NOT taking a break from something" XD Joelle has stopped waking up early. Usually, she is the type to rise together with the sun but in order to increase her sleeping hours, she will wake up later when she is on tour. A restful sleep will help her body heal up and improve her voice. rito has quit chewing gum (and stopped eating certain chewy foods such as squid) because it's bad for your jaw and facial muscles. Kaori has taken a break from watching the drama "Anithero" (for which YK is composing music, the main theme having been performed as the intro of this live). Seems like the song is haunting her a bit too much and the story is getting to her. So once the tour is over and she is no longer singing the song, she will have an easier time watching the episodes. Yuki agrees that the main theme is quite haunting. Especially when she hears one of the singers rehearsing in the dressing-room right before a performance. Eri doesn't really have anything to tell the audience but she and Yuki briefly talk about the difficulties of learning so many songs with coined words.

Gaia: Wow, what a lovely song. Instant like. Really adore Eri here!! Such gorgeous high notes.

Credens justitiam: What a great team-up with Keiko, Eri, Yuriko and Joelle. Eri sounds great together here with Keiko. Does Yuriko sound a bit off here? I don't know. Not 100% into some of her parts.

hepatica: First time actively listening to this song. Very beautiful and tender. I feel like some of Yuki's KnK work might have been inspired by this song. Some parts immediately made me think of "Seventh Heaven".

godsibb: Waaah! Yes!! Always a joy to listen to this song. Glad everyone is on stage for a powerful finale.

Alone: I knew I would love this Pandora Hearts medley. I always do and this one is no exception. Flawless start.

Bloody rabbit: Some squeaky parts at the beginning but overall, solid.

Contractor: OBSESSED. One word. Perfection. There's a reason this is the performance I'm using for this post. I'm forever a slave to Keiko's solo part XD. Also, Eri is such a queen here! So cool!

zodiacal sign: This is the song where you can really tell that they are taking great care of Kaori's condition. No strenuous movements at all. How funny is it to see Rie joining the girls in their little dance?! Cute!! Super fun performance as always.

open your heart: Ughh, I do not like this song at all. They did "Sweet Song"/"paradise regained" for most of the other performances. Would have killed to get either of those two instead of "open your heart". Obviously, "Sweet Song" would have been perfect. From what I heard, the final concert with Kaori in July had an amazing and heart-warming performance of "Sweet Song".

En.Prologue〜このとほかやわらかい: Wish I could grow to love this song. It deserves my love, I know it. But I just can't get into it. But hey, it's a cool performance, I can't deny that. During her solos, Kaori sounds a bit nasal in my opinion. Nothing that takes away from the performance but it's certainly noticeable (throughout the live to be honest - at least during the few songs where she has a substantial solo part. I think you can also hear it during the main MC. Either she had a minor cold that day or it's just a symptom of her pregnancy. Lowered nasal resonance is actually a very common thing for pregnant women.)

En.Parade: Beautiful. No notes.

En.蒼穹のファンファーレ: Solid. Not a huge fan of the song though.

[thesweetnessofspring]

Why do you hate epic? I've recently heard it and I don't like it also, especially when I googled his story. But why do you hate it?

First, no hate to the creator. Like, I heard he's a college kid doing a creative project and a lot of people like it which is great. And concept albums get tweaked. Maybe it's something he can salvage or rework in the future, but as it is, I just don't like Epic at all.

I'd listened to what was out about....six months ago maybe? And I wasn't particularly taken with it, but then back in like July I relistened to it and I just got so tired listening to it. I think a spin on that line from The Incredibles sums up that part of it well:

If all of the music is epic, none of it will be.

Even in big megamusicals like Les Mis, there's a variety of songs. You have the love songs, the reflective songs, the "party" songs, the exposition songs, and just a variety of tone and pace. In listening to what is now the most recent release, I got weary of listening to the same old video game music set to bad lyrics (we'll get to that). There's no variety, which makes the whole album flat. Halfway through I wanted to scream GIVE ME SOMETHING ELSE FOR THE LOVE OF ZEUS!!! I don't think the idea of video game music works for musicals. They're completely different mediums and the narrative structure of video games (at least as he's presented them) also leads to a static story. If I sit down and play a video game with different bosses, then it makes sense. I complete a level and then take a break/live my life until I come back and work on the next level. There doesn't feel to be any forward momentum in the story because it's just "boss" after "boss" with a highly intense video game music soundtrack. It's static, it's flat, it's tiring. I cannot imagine sitting through a stage show of this. I'd be leaving early after intermission.

It is painfully obvious this is a TikTok musical, because the music can be good in short spurts but as a 2.5 hour stage musical? I wouldn't be able to do it. I barely did it when I broke it up over a few car rides.

Also the lyrics are mostly just bad, particularly in the rhymes. Like I said, I've listened to it I guess 1.5 times as the first time I listened they didn't have as many songs out as there are now. So I can't quote any, but it wasn't just a couple times. There were whole songs where I was internally (as I was driving) rolling my eyes at the awkward, hokey rhymes.

And look, I haven't read The Odyssey since high school, so I'm not going to pretend to be a scholar. I have read Odysseus as a character in other retellings of Greek myths, though, and he's a much more dynamic and interesting character than the boring, predictable hero of Epic. I remember when first being exposed to The Odyssey, it was my first foray into more complicated dynamics of Greek mythology instead of the more digestable/cleaned-up versions I'd heard as a younger kid, and part of that was Odysseus. He made decisions I just couldn't understand at the time. A big thing for me as a 15-year-old kid was I was so mad at all of Odysseus's affairs. Now I know that in Greece that wasn't so much a big deal for men to sleep around and was expected. Yet (at least with Circe) he's noble and fighting her off and it gives the impression that Odysseus hasn't had any sex in like 12 years. I'm sorry, but WHAT??? Odysseus loves his wife and he's a slut. C'mon. Epic Odysseus is so predictable and boring I'm not drawn into the story at all for him, either. When I finally got to the more recent releases, I was thinking, "Oh, wow what a surprise. Before he didn't want to kill people and now he's fed up and will kill people so he can get home. Ohhhh noooooo what will ever happen in the next part of the musical?? Is it possible he will learn that vengeance is bad???" To be fair this part hasn't come out yet so maybe I'll be wrong but ugh, it's not looking good.

To balance things out, I do think the opening number is good and I like the one with the winds "keep your friends close/and your enemies closer" is an earworm, and because it changed up the usual "video game epic music" thing. And like, as a student project it is impressive. But it's not a student project anymore, it's a concept album. Idk if he's planning on staging it at some point, but if he does, it has a lot of work still to do.

Anyway vote Hadestown. ✌️

[seaofreverie]

Vibing.

[hockeyandhrsepwr]

Life Lessons: The Intro

Fresh of a world tour, y/n l/n announces her next album.....

Life Lessons Masterlist

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yourusername Life Lessons. Coming soon.

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fan39 new music?! ahhhhh

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Notes

Notes pop star y/n l/n announces new album: Life Lessons. To learn more about the album, check out our conversation with the young talent at this link

What’s next for y/n?

By Michelle F.

July 20, 2023

On the eve of y/n l/ns final date for her sold out world tour, I receive a phone call. It’s an invitation to the show in Paris La Defense Arena, and the opportunity to speak to y/n about what’s coming next for the pop sensation. A no brainer really. I’ve been following y/ns journey pretty much since she came onto the scene and to hear that she personally requested me to speak to? That was a shock but an absolute honour. So I hop on the Eurostar and make my way to the City of Love, Lights and Dreams. 

 A mere three hours later I’m waiting in the wings as Y/n takes the stage to a deafening crowd. The Monaco native cracks a joke in french, later translated as a slight dig at the French but all in good fun. The performance is electric as y/n performs tracks from her first three albums, all of which took the world by storm and dominated charts. One of my favourite shows that I’ve been to in a while.  Keep reading to hear more about our conversation after the show. 

Michelle: Hi y/n! That was an incredible show!

Y/n: Oh thank you Michelle, youre too kind. 

M: How does it feel, being onstage and performing for that large of a crowd? Tonight’s was pretty big but not the largest of your tour, correct?

Y: I think we had a few bigger, but it’s hard to explain. This is something I’ve dreamed of for my entire life so even though its nerve wracking, I know that I’m where I want to be. This tour has been pretty eye opening! Tonight was special though! I’ve been to many a concert in those stadium with my friends, since it was the closest major arena to Monaco so we could just hop on a train and see our favourite artists and make a girl trip out of it. 

M: That sounds so fun! This was your first tour headlining, what did you find was the biggest difference between that and opening? You opened for Ed Sheeran on his tour after the release of your second album and now for your third youre headlining.  

Y: besides people being here mostly to see me, not someone else, longer sets is the biggest difference. But i’m working with lots of the same crew that worked on the tour with Ed so it’s been pretty epic!

M: So the big question, what’s next?

Y: well….I might have something coming soon. 

M: oh, do tell! A new album?

Y: I guess I can tell you :) My next album, Life Lessons, will be releasing pretty soon. 

M: tell me everything? When are we looking at release? What’s it all about? Track names?

Y: haha, no definite date yet, but it will be soon (she winks). As for what it’s about, life. It’s been about three years in the making, so the lessons that I’ve learned over the past three years. Track names you’ll find out along with everyone else haha 

M: I guess I can accept that. Three years? How so?

Y: well, its a series of songs that I’ve written over the past 3 years at varying points and finally decided, you know what, lets release them and see what people think. 

M: will it be similar to your previous albums, stylistically, or will we see something more than the indie pop sound we’ve come to know from you?

Y: Everything really. my usual (she air quotes) sound, but some songs with slightly different vibes. There may even be a few country inspired.

M: Country’s a new genre for you. Are you a big fan normally?

Y: oh absolutely. Its nowhere near as popular here in Europe, but my granddad is from Georgia so I grew up with it in the house. When I was putting all the lyrics to music, a few of them I wanted to have a country feel, so I reached out to few friends and got opinions and everyone loved it. I decided that I dont mind if my fans dont love those songs, this album is for me. I hope they do, of course, but it is a different genre than my normal so I’d understand if they dont vibe with them as much as my other songs. 

M: Speaking of friends, any co-writers or collaborators on this album? You recently had a track with your ex boyfriend Noah Kahan on his album. Is he returning the favour?

Y: ha, nope. This one is all me. My producer and best friend, Bella, and my tour band helped with laying down the tracks, but lyrics are all me. 

M: well I’m excited. And sorry to bring it up, but your realtionship with Noah, did that provide any inspiration for the album? 

Y: yes, but probably not in the way people will be expecting. Noahs great though. We were great friends before our fling started and we’ve stayed good friends after. We all have those moments right, where we think that trying to be more is a good idea. He’s an incredible guy though. 

M: So does the album follow any kind of order? 

Y: Somewhat chronological over the period but nothing concrete. 

M: well y/n I hope our readers feel the same but I can’t wait!! I’ll be impatiently waiting for the release. Thank you again for taking to time to talk to me today. Enjoy the little break you’ll have!!

Y: thanks Michelle, I’m sure well talk soon!

Get excited readers,  this album is going to be special. 

[subtle-as-an-earthquake]

i am finally home and i'm pretty knackered but aaaahhh what a weekend!! ✨✨ so much happened in such a short amount of time, i'm still processing i think (also some personal stuff, that i won't bore you with). but yeah, the shows were absolutely epic, they were such good crowds for london standards. very rowdy but overall the atmosphere was amazing, and tbh that's probably in part because miles just exudes such incredible energy himself, if you ask me

just a little snippet of don't forget who you are from yesterday (night two) to illustrate:

also, a few random things i'm remembering now (which i'll put under the cut because i apparently remembered more than i thought):

miles seemed really really into it both nights, and really centered somehow? he was clearly having a blast and had everyone eating out of the palm of his hand, he's just SUCH an incredible showman. that's nothing new of course, but I was once again struck by just how very special and awe inspiring and just incredibly fun it is to watch him do his thing on stage. no one does it like miles fucking kane, baby

also, there were so many men in the audience who were just really letting go during the show, hugging their mates and singing the lyrics at each other, even full on crying when miles played colour of the trap (not even kidding, actual tears streaming down their faces). i don't think i've ever seen that at another gig to that extent, really. miles and his music seem to have - for want of a better phrase - a sort of liberating effect on a lot of men that's really nice to witness

on night one miles slipped on a spilled drink on stage and took a little tumble, but he recovered like a king and honestly it just made him look even cooler somehow lol

his arms and shoulders......... are sooooooo...... 🔥🔥🔥 dear fucking lord. his shoulders are broader than ever and honestly it was very hard to concentrate on anything else 🫠

after the show, we were chatting to ben for a bit who was just the sweetest and again talked about how he was a fan first (of arctic monkeys and tlsp and miles) and then sort of organically came to be a part of the band, and has just been having the time of his life so far! we were still chatting to him when miles came out after night 1, and when everyone started whooping, ben started screaming 'aaaaaahhh miles!!!' really loudly as a joke, before starting an impromptu chorus of the don't forget who you are 'la la la' that everyone joined in on. it was pretty hilarious

liam was super sweet too, and when he learned that i was dutch he was like 'oh we're playing a show in holland next week!' so i was like 'i know, i'm going!' and then he offered to put me on the guestlist, which was very kind of him even though i already have tickets lmao. he and ben both were very excited for that show for some reason, which made me even more excited as well!!

after night two ben and liam shared a massive hug outside and they both seemed really emotional, which was very sweet to see 🥺

nathan is the loveliest man alive. he said this tour was definitely the best one yet because the energy's just been amazing! he also asked us what are favourite album and song of the night was (his own fave was never taking me alive) and when I mentioned i just loved the bassline in coup de grace so much, he said it was as fun to play as it sounds, and that on the album it was actually miles who played it (that's probably common knowledge, but i didn't know!)

he also said that the band really is very close and they're all equals, and miles always says "we", and that he really is as kind and lovely as he seems 🥺 i mean, we knew that, but it was still really lovely to hear!

and of course, miles was once again just the most wonderful, gracious man ever with his fans, chatting to as many people as he could and taking pics with them and cooing at turtle paraphernalia, all while looking and smelling absolutely diviiiiine. he did seemed pretty knackered though, especially after night two, but that makes sense i think. and yet he still came out! truly a hero

as for my own chat with him, i for some reason went up to him like 'hiiiiiiiiiiiii' with my hands held out to him (idk man), and he just reciprocated my enthusiasm and took my hands and then held them and looked me in the eye while i rambled at him about how incredible i thought the show and he himself were, and he was just completely lovely, as always 🥺 such an angel

oh and finally, maxie is apparently staying with miles's mum while miles is on tour 🥺

i'm sure i'm forgetting things but this is already long enough 🙈 going to catch some zzz's now, i need them after this weekend

[espionn]

so uh. hi epic the musical fans.

i finally listened to the entirety of the concept album after putting it off for.. way too long. i have Thoughts. i havent been able to stop thinking about it. so basically here's a long post of all my gushing about epic so i don't keep blowing up my friend's texts about it.

-first and foremost: i am insane about the "man vs monster" trope. i love it. just a man was always going to be one of my favorite songs, but listening to it back now that i know the entire story (after listening to monster especially) HOLY SHIT. the moment he killed that baby, he was never going to come home as "just a man". i think that no matter what choice he made, he was never going to relive his old life. either his wife and son died, or he threw away his own innocence and moral ground. of course later he makes greater and greater sacrifices, but there was never going to be any turning back from that. and the fucked up part is he knew his choice before he made it, even when he was pleading with zeus. that final "i'm just a man" as he commits his first truly indefensible act is haunting.

-i really really like athena's piano motif, it feels so good every time it comes in

-i LOVE polyphemus's song. its the first really dark and sinister feeling part of the musical, and it HITS. the deep, cavernous feeling of 600 men holding their breaths when polyphemus first appears. that slow, reverberating eeriness. polyphemus's voice is *perfect.* it's perfectly inhuman and intimidating. you can hear how enormous he is in just the quality of his voice. it's incredible. and it works really nicely into the horror of survive. you really feel the size of the cave, the darkness, the terror the crew is feeling once polyphemus gets the club. its so good musically

-the theme in luck runs out coming back later in mutiny... im unwell

-CIRCE'S VOICE OH MY GOD (i already know im a lesbian there is no need for this) (i would have gone inside too im not even gonna pretend otherwise. eurylochus is a stronger man than i)

-love love love the harp part in wouldn't you like, it's so obvious but still so good. its also just a very fun song and i love hermes's VA, theres so much energy in the performance

-there are other ways is SO good, especially after a few re-listens. there's this latin swing quality to it that works so well. ive said my piece on circe's voice, i don't think i need to explain. i also really like the subversion of expectation. "forgive me", "i'm just a man", and for people who know the og myth, we're bracing ourselves. but then ody pushes away and earns circe's respect. her slyly coming back in with "there are other ways of persuasion" after he mentions poseidon is excellent. i love this version of circe a lot

-the repeat of "all i hear are screams" while in the underworld with his dead crew calling for their captain... lord. also, knowing that the people in the underworld are chanting their last thoughts makes the scenes with polites and ody's mother so much more emotional. his "i took too long" as he embraces his mother, still waiting for him in the grave, is soul-crushing.

-no longer you is one of my favorite moments in the entire thing. every line has a double meaning. and "i see a man who makes it home alive... but it's no longer you" is such a perfect narrative catharsis for all the themes that have been building

-and then its followed by monster, which brings the resolution to just a man that we've been waiting for. when i originally herd the line "ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves", it didnt fully resonate with me, but this song made me realize what it was saying as odysseus, hurting so badly, does the only thing he can to lessen the weight of the guilt. the music makes it feel so big. its a moment of catharsis in its own way. underworld saga is short but it delivers blow after blow

-different beast... damn. this song doesnt hold back any more than odysseus does. i don't think he would have been quite so vengeful if the sirens hadn't impersonated penelope specifically, but they effectively went for the one part of him he still cherished, and that sealed their fate. still, the shrieks of the sirens overtop of "kill them all" is heavy

-scylla. what can i even say about scylla. her voice is *haunting*. ethereal. inhuman. knowing what's going to happen, this song is an experience i cant even describe. odysseus and scylla both understand, they both know what's happening. "eurylochus, light up six torches" / "deep down, we're only demons from hell". im going to break something

-mutiny bringing back the theme from luck runs out is so big. hearing odysseus being unable to defend himself, only wanting to go home. the real betrayal from eurylochus, having been willing just two sagas ago to abandon everyone and run with him, now willing to kill him to save the rest of the crew. later, with helios's cows, i wholeheartedly agree with the idea that it was a suicide. he isnt stupid. but he's hungry, and tired, and while ody is willing to become the monster to get home, eury isnt. to him, this is the easiest way.

-the echoes of the same pleas from the horse and the infant, again in thunder bringer. but he knows he's going to do it. i dont think its about penelope and telemachus anymore, not really. its about everything they represent. they are a destination. closure. normalcy. an anchor. he has to get to them because they are all that's stopping him from admitting what he's done

-TELEMACHUS

-i understand why some people dont like the time jump and sudden change of perspective, its definitely jarring and a bit weird, but i also think its the best you can do with something as nonlinear and oddly structured as the odyssey.

-little wolf is such an earworm, ive been finding myself chanting "fight little wolf, fight little wolf". athena's piano cue as she appears to help out telemachus is a deeply satisfying moment. i LOVE the theme coming back in, but this time with athena's voice overriding the suitors', and "little wolf" going from a taunt to an endearment. i also just need to say... antinous's voice. vile character but damn can that guy sing

-ok ok fine i see why god games is so popular

-not sorry for loving you... hm. im torn on this song. i think its good at portraying calypso as a sympathetic abuser. and i dont think theres an issue with sympathetic abusers. but i guess it might have worked better if we saw odysseus's point of view instead of just hers. it feels a little weird focusing on the perpetrator rather than the victim is all. i think its possible to do both effectively and this doesnt really. pretty song though

-dangerous is so good though. its so catchy and exhilarating and i was so happy to hear from hermes again

-i do have a question though. what's the deal with the wind bag? i didn't fully get it earlier either, i didnt see why eurylochus used the last of it behind odysseus's back, that didn't make sense to me. and now i dont know why hermes gave it to him. he says the gods went through a lot of pain to get it, but *why?* if using it dooms his hope to get home, why would they give it to him? i know he ends up using it to save himself but like. it's not like they knew that would happen. what was the plan here?

-anyway. get in the water into 600 strike is powerful. i dont have much commentary but i really like the questions and answers posed by these songs. and "how will you sleep at night?" / "next to my wife." is pretty iconic

-PENELOPE OH MY GOD

-the reprise of the "waiting, waiting" theme, oh god im not ok

-hold them down is EXCELLENT, its so murky and revolting and antinous's voice SELLS it

-the song odysseus being from the suitors' point of view was an excellent choice. ody becomes, thematically, one of the monsters. the choir chanting "od / dy / se / us" is powerful and heavy and terrifying. the music is so good at making you feel like one of the suitors, in the dark, weaponless, with the king circling you and picking you off one by one. he really feels like a stalking predator. after 20 years of nothing but hardships and gods and monsters trying to keep him from home, now that he's here theres nothing any of them could hope to do to save themselves. the king has come home and he's PISSED

-"show yourself" and then the piano doing a cascading chromatic scale... this musical is so good

-i just listened to would you fall in love with me again for the second time. fuck me. its worse than the first time. (as in the emotions. not the quality.) i love that she asks him what he did, and he tells her. that says so much about them both. she isn't afraid to hear it, she just wants to know what he's been through. and he recounts every awful thing he did, without hesitation, trusting in her judgment completely. he's finally able to unpack all that trauma. and she just listens. she challenges him when he claims to no longer be the same man. this whole time, he's only had himself, his own narrative, his belief that he's become a monster. and now she pushes back, and says "i look at you and i still see the man i married". and then a soaring reprise of the theme from just a man comes in.... i need it known that i feel very distinctly not ok.

so i just spent 2 hours going back through to write all of that when i could have just said: it is VERY GOOD. im going to be thinking about this for a while still.

[creativia10]

Interesting Sing-through Part 1: Assigning Roles

Epic the musical is a concept album that has a way of getting a hold of it's listeners. Thomas and the Sides are no exception to this. Roman leads the sides into an 'Epic the musical' singalong. Virgil has some interesting realizations and observations as they do so.

word count: 4608

Notes: I've gotten really into 'Epic the Musical' lately. (Title may change.)

So I don't know how many parts this will have yet or how often I'll update. I currently have checks notes maybe six ideas related to Epic. One is a crossover with sanders sides, others are Epic fics.

The sides watch Roman as he sits at the desk muttering to himself out loud. Writing something out, the Epic playlist on YouTube already pulled up on the computer. Thomas had recently discovered the concept album of ‘Epic the Musical’ on YouTube. It didn’t take long for Roman to become obsessed. They had all already heard Roman singing these songs often. Not to mention some of the other sides doing so as well such as Patton, Janus, and Remus. So with this in mind, Virgil was filled with a sense of dread when he heard Roman muttering. As he had heard their names and Epic character names. Roman sat up straighter and nodded to himself before turning to face the others. 

“Okay, so I have some ideas on who can sing what for the next sing along,” Roman said.

“Seriously?” Virgil asked.

Logan sighed.  “We know how Roman gets when he’s really into a new media. It will be hard to get him to focus on much else,” Logan said.

Roman pouted. 

“It might be best to go along with this for now,” Logan continued. 

Virgil blinked and looked at Logan. “I didn’t expect you of all sides to be on board with this,” Virgil said.

“I didn’t say I was particularly enthused. But going with this could help get it out of his system. Thus making it easier to get productive things done after,” Logan said.

“But that’s not a guarantee,” Virgil said. 

“I mean, I can’t predict the future Virgil. However, I do think the length of the musical could aid with this as well. It’s rather lengthy, with more songs than the typical musical. So singing through it would be spending a good amount of time doing so. Which has a better chance of ‘scratching that itch’, you could say, for the content,” Logan said. 

Virgil sighed and nodded. “Yeah alright,” Virgil said. 

“Oh come now, Virgil. We are all fans of this musical after all,” Roman said.

“Yeah, but…” That didn’t mean he wanted to sing in front of everyone.  When Virgil didn’t continue, Roman got out the paper he’d been writing on.

“Okay, so I’m going to sing for Odysseus,” Roman struck a heroic pose after he said so, “Obviously.”

Patton giggled a bit. Logan just rolled his eyes. 

“So I think Virgil should sing for Zeus,” Roman continued. 

Virgil blinked.  “Wait really?”

Roman nodded. “Mhm! You have the low voice for it, and would be good at playing a menacing role.” 

“Roman, we have the same voice.”

“But you tend to sing the lower parts though!”

“I guess. I would have to tell someone to drop a baby from a building though,” Virgil muttered.

“Technically, he doesn’t specify how to get rid of the boy,” Logan said. 

“Not really the point, the Logan,” Virgil said.

“Virgil, it’s not as though Thomas hasn’t played a bad guy before. And this isn’t even a bad guy. Odysseus just does things that are questionable to us, but for the good.  Anyways, Thomas has been JD in Heathers after all,” Roman said.

“True…” This felt different somehow though.  “You think I can sing for a powerful god?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah! You can definitely have  a big presence when you chose to,” Roman said.

“…thanks?” When he thought about it though, it might be fun to pretend for a bit. Like he actually had control in something. Especially with how he often felt as anxiety. He was still nervous about doing Zeus’s big song, ‘Thunder bringer’ justice though. It was an epic song, and a good one. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the attention he’d get from the others when it came up as well.

“Patton will be Polites, of course,” Roman said.

“Oh! Yeah that makes sense,” Patton said with a smile. 

“So because there’s so many parts, some of us will sing for more than one. I’ll try to put it so they don’t conflict though,” Roman said.

“I want to play all the villains!” Remus exclaimed with a manic laugh.

Roman sighed. “I’m sure you’ll be good at that. I don’t know if it will work for you to play all of them though,” Roman said.

“Prometheus?” 

Roman paused for a moment then nodded.

“Yeah, you can be Prometheus.”

“Antinous?”

Roman huffed out a bit of a laugh at that, “Yeah you can definitely be vicious enough for him. Not to mention some of the rough stuff Jorge has released in his later songs. I don’t think anyone else here would be comfortable singing those. But we don’t have to worry about that today anyways, since we’ll only be doing the released stuff. Now-!”

Roman turned to Logan.  “I think you should sing for Poseidon.”

Logan blinked. “Oh really? I figured I was a better fit for Athena,” He said.

Virgil was a bit surprised by that as well.

“Athena matches you more in actual personality. But I’m considering other factors as well for who sings what. For one, his big song ‘Ruthlessness’ is a very angry song, and we know you have experience with getting very angry.”

“FALSEHOOD!” 

Roman had already leaned back as though expecting that reaction. Logan paused for a moment then huffed.

“Fair enough. Why else?” Logan asked.

Roman hesitated, mulling over how to phrase it.

Remus just snickered.  “He’s trying to say you could pull off a very masculine role well,” Remus said. 

Logan’s eyebrows raise at that. “Ah…I see,” His expression was a bit hard to read, but he seemed contemplative. 

“I’ll be Circe,” Janus said. The other sides looked at him. He smirked and raised an eyebrow.  “What?”

“That’s just, not what I would have expected from you,” Roman said. 

“And why not?” Janus asked. Roman seemed unsure what to say. Janus smirked. “What, is it because you’re surprised I’d volunteer to play a role where I have to pretend to flirt with you?”

“Uh, well…I mean-“ Despite his stuttering, the look on Roman’s face seemed to confirm that. 

Janus straightened up and waved a hand around himself. His outfit transformed into a red toga-like dress inspired by some Circe fanart. He started to saunter over to Roman. 

“There are other ways of persuasion. There are other modes of control~,” Janus sang. Virgil expected Roman to back away, but was instead surprised to see Roman freeze.  “There are other means of Deceit~” He hissed on the cee part of the word. Roman’s eyes trailed Janus as the other came closer. “There are other roads to the soul~” Janus got to Roman and lightly trailed his hand up his arm. “There are other actions of passion~” He leaned closer to Roman. “You have so much left to learn~” Janus sang as almost a whisper that time, close to Roman’s face. Virgil saw Roman’s breath catch and how he blushed. 

Virgil frowned.   “Okay! You made your point or whatever,” Virgil called. Whether the point was about him playing Circe or something else, Virgil wasn’t sure. 

Janus glanced to him with a satisfied look, not moving away for a moment. Then he let out a bit of a chuckle before leaning back away from Roman. Janus waved his hand again, transforming into a more casual outfit. Then he walked back over to his initial spot.  Roman cleared his throat, still looking a little flushed. Then his eyes widened and he looked to Virgil.

“Virgil, I…”

Virgil sighed and waved him off.  “It’s fine, I guess.” He wasn’t mad at Roman after all. He wasn’t thrilled, but he understood. It’s not like he hadn’t been there. 

Roman seemed unsure if he believed Virgil, which was fair. The animosity between him and Janus was clear to everyone. 

Remus snickered. 

“You know, some of the fans of Epic have talked about a manwhore au-“ Remus said.

Roman sighed.  “This is a serious sing through! We can check out things like that later,” Roman said. 

Remus pouted a bit but shrugged.

“Okay, let’s get back to it!” Roman looked back to his paper.  “Uhh,” Roman hummed.  “Hermes I guess could be Remus?”

Remus shrugged. “As long as I get to play destructive villains, I don’t care who else.”

“Why Remus?” Patton asked. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that of course! But-“

“It does seem a bit tame for Remus, doesn’t it?” Janus cut in. Patton nodded a bit hesitantly. 

Roman sighed. “Yeah, I know. Aside from that, I think he could easily match the almost wackiness of the character though. I mean, I can’t really picture Logan busting a move,” He said. Virgil laughed at that, along with a couple of the others. Logan hummed but didn’t disagree.  “Okay, so Tiresias or the prophet can be Patton. I think he has a soft enough voice for that,” Roman said. 

“Alright, sounds good,” Patton said.  Roman looked back at his sheet, and seemed unsure about something as he furrowed his brows.  “Okay, um…” 

Remus looked over Roman’s shoulder at the song list pulled up on the computer. “Oo, I can be Scylla!” He exclaimed. 

Roman hesitated.  “Character-wise that works, I’m just not sure if you can voice her.”

Remus snickered. “Did you forget we’re imaginary, genius?” He shook himself out and then transformed so he now looked like the voice actress of Scylla. He still wore his usual getup otherwise though. Remus cleared his throat with really nasal sounds before taking a deep breath. 

“DROWN IN YOUR SORROW AND FEARS,” Remus belted out loudly with a powerful female voice and continued, “CHOKE ON YOUR BLOOD AND YOUR TEARS BLEED 'TIL YOU'VE RUN OUT OF YEARS WE MUST DO WHAT IT TAKES TO SURVIVE~”

They all stared at him, impressed. Patton’s eyes were wide, but he did clap enthusiastically. Remus gave him an unsettling grin and bowed. Patton’s face grew a bit nervous at the grin.

“Alright, Remus has got down Scylla then,” Roman said, writing that down.  Remus transformed back. 

“Yay!”

“No killer tentacles for the scene!” Virgil, Janus, and Roman all yelled at the same time.

Remus frowned a bit at that. “Aww, fine! But it loses something without that sense of danger.”

The other sides let out sighs of relief at that. 

“Okay, so-“ Roman started. 

“You forgot Athena,” Logan said. Roman nodded. 

“I didn’t forget her…I just wasn’t sure who she would go to yet.”

“There’s also Eurylochus,” Janus pointed out. “You can hardly be all the crew when there are songs they have conversations in.”

“Right, right…” Roman thought as he looked around at all of them.  “Hmm…you know, I think we need more singers actually,” Roman said. Then he made an upwards motion with both of his hands, bringing two new presences into the room. 

“Gurl, what the hell!?”

“Whoa, what!?”

Now in the room was Remy who represented sleep…and character Dr. Emile Picani from the cartoon therapy series?

The sides looked at Roman then. Roman shrugged. 

“What? He was already an active character in the imagination. I know he’s only had like three episodes, so I threw a bit of Logan and Patton in there. You know, it seemed fitting.” Patton and Logan both looked at Emile after that. Logan seemed unsure how to take that. Emile blinked, looking very confused. 

“Roman, if you were just going to bring in someone from the imagination, why not create an Epic figment?” Logan asked. 

Roman shrugged again.  “To stay on theme?” He said. Logan huffed and rolled his eyes.

“Oh, well uh, do you how do folks? Mind telling me what’s going on?” Emile asked. 

“We’re assigning people to sing different parts in Epic the musical for a sing along. I needed more singers so I brought you two here,” Roman said.

“Oh! Well that sure sounds fun. I’d love to join,” Emile said.

“Mhm,” said Roman.  Remy smirked and sauntered over to Emile. “Well I’m never going to complain about seeing your pretty face,” Remy said with a wink. He took Emile’s hand and brought it to his lips for a kiss. With his free hand, Emile covered his mouth and giggled, turning pink. The sides looked to Roman again. 

“I mean, it’s a popular ship with fans. Not too surprising this happened,” Roman said. 

Remy scoffed.  “You don’t need to take credit for this. I spend time in the imagination too after all. Besides, he’s a cutie,” Remy said. 

Emile shook his head, smiling shyly through his fluster.

“Okay, anyways!” Roman clapped.  “Roles!” Roman pointed to Emile.

“You’re Athena.

“Oh! Okay.”

“Why did you wait for Emile before placing Athena?” Logan asked. 

“I was unsure who would fit, but I think it works for Emile. He’s a smart guy, and can have a soft edge to him as well,” Roman said.

Logan hummed as he considered that and then nodded. 

“I’m smart too,” Janus said. 

“Did you want to be her?” Roman asked.

“Well now I’m curious to see how therapy boy does with it,” Janus said looking curiously at Emile. Emile smiled at him.

“Okay then,” Roman said. 

“There’s always another time,” Patton said.

Virgil groaned at the thought of doing this whole thing again, even though they hadn’t even started this one yet.

Roman ignored Virgil as he then turned to Remy and pointed to him.  “You’re Eurylochus.”

“Who?” Remy asked.

“Remy, how could you not know Epic the musical by now? Roman sings it all the time,” Virgil snarked. 

Remy scoffed and looked to him.  “Of course I know it. Doesn’t mean I know all the characters though.”

Logan answered, “He is the second in command of Odysseus’s crew and army. His role is often the voice of the crew.”

“Kay, cool,” Remy said as he slurped on his coffee.

“Uh, speaking of not knowing things, are we supposed to have the songs memorized?” Emile asked nervously. 

Roman waved.  “Do not worry, this is meant to just be a fun sing-through. I will provide the lyrics for the songs for everyone,” He said. 

“Okay, good. Thank you,” Emile said.

“Of course. Oh and we’ll all sing the ensemble parts when it doesn’t conflict with our assigned roles,” Roman said.

“Oh, alright! That makes sense,” Emile said.

“So I didn’t need to have solos?” Virgil asked.

Roman frowned at him.  “Aw, come on Virge. It will be fun!”

“Yeah yeah, I’ll still do it,” He just felt the need to point that out.

“Okay, great!” Roman hummed. “You know, Remy might be a better fit for Hermes than Remus,” Roman said. 

Patton turned to Remus then.  “Is that alright with you Remus?” He asked. 

Remus was…using something unidentifiable to pick at his teeth.  “Yeah, I don’t care,” He said. 

“Cool,” Remy said. 

“Hermes has some cool dance songs,” Emile added. 

Remy smiled. “Oh hell yeah, I’m so down for bringing the party,” He said.

Emile giggled at that. 

Roman looked back at Emile but hesitated. 

“Would you be good singing for the sirens and Penelope?” He asked.

“Oh, uh, yeah I think I could pull that off,” Emile said. 

“You don’t have to do the siren screams,” Roman added.

“Yeah I wasn’t going to,” Emile said.

That was one thing that was different about Emile compared to Patton. He was better at asserting boundaries for himself. Which might seem strange since Patton has often acted authoritative like a dad. But that has always come from what he thinks he has to enforce. Patton was not great at taking care of himself still. Which said something for why it took a lot for him to be convinced to do better for Thomas. Not that he wasn’t trying of course. Virgil may not be thrilled with a lot of the things Patton has done, but it was clear he needed to care for himself better. Whereas is makes sense that Emile, a cartoon therapist, knows how to assert himself.  Roman simply nodded at that comment. 

“Fair enough,” He said.

“Why did you need someone else to join for those other characters? Why not assign them to say, Patton?” Janus asked. 

Roman blinked and glanced from Patton to Emile.  “Oh! Well uh, Penelope reminds me of a softer version of Athena in some ways. Clever like her husband. Also, despite the siren being disguised, there’s still the part of pretending to be such a character. Which I have a hard time picturing Patton doing. Not hissing without laughing that is. Er, no offense Patton,” Roman said.

“Oh that’s okay, ki-Roman. I don’t mind,” Patton laughed a little, “You probably have a point there. Besides, I’m going to have plenty fun with what I have.”

“And I still have ideas for other parts you can sing as well! I just haven’t gotten there yet,” Roman said. 

Janus then cut back in, “So what I’m hearing is you don’t think Patton fits smart characters? Are you saying you don’t think he’s smart?”

Roman’s eyes widened.  “What, no! Of course not! It’s just-“  Roman looked around from Janus, to Patton, to Emile, and back. 

Virgil glared at Janus and hissed at him. Stupid snake. He was flirting with Roman earlier and now he went back to teasing him. What was the deal? Janus just raised an eyebrow at him, but he looked way too satisfied with himself to play innocent. Bastard.

Patton looked like he wasn’t sure what to believe, but Janus’ suggestion clearly upset him. 

Logan sighed and adjusted his glasses.  “Honestly, Janus. There is way more to assigning a role to someone than their intelligence. Especially since it is a façade. All that matters is if they can convince the viewer of their character’s intelligence. Roman knows more about this stuff works than the rest of us. Not to mention there are stereotypes for intelligent people. Which I myself have been said to resemble.”

Janus blinked, apparently surprised that Logan came to Roman’s defense. Roman sighed in relief.

“Thank you, Specs!”

“It was nothing,” Logan waved off, but Virgil caught a small smile there. Virgil half-smiled as well. 

He knew Roman wouldn’t cast someone a role just to be mean. He’d even taken Janus’ seriously, and let Remus be who he wanted. Roman took assigning parts for something like this seriously. He wanted to do so fairly, even though this was simply a sing-along among them. 

“So after the sirens-“

“Oh, wait. Sorry, but, what about Odysseus’s mom in the underworld song?” Patton asked. Roman cleared his throat and glanced away. 

“I was actually going to skip that part of the song,” He said.  That wasn’t too surprising. Roman usually didn’t include that in his individual sing-throughs. Thomas cried every time he heard it, so it would fit that Roman would do the same. They could all probably guess that was the reason.

Patton nodded. “Alright.” 

Roman nodded too. “Now, as I was saying,” He hums a bit as he checks where they were.  “I think I’m a good fit for Telemachus,” He said.

Logan nodded. “Yes, his song does sound very much like something you would sing,” He said.

“Thank you, Logan. Although, eventually it should go to someone else. Since Odysseus and Telemachus had songs together. Probably Remy,” Roman said.

“Yeah alright,” Remy said, giving a thumbs up with his free hand. 

“What about Thomas?” Emile asked. 

Roman looked over at him. “What about Thomas?” He asked.

“Couldn’t he sing a role?” Emile asked. 

Roman paused. “Well,” he waved to the room around them, “This is going to be in his head.” 

“I know…” Emile started. 

“The thing is, were Thomas to join us as one of the singers he would probably be a better fit for Odysseus. So I would be Telemachus,” Roman said.

“And Roman doesn’t like having less songs to sing,” Janus added.

Roman frowned and looked at Janus.  “That’s not the only reason,” Roman said.

“Ah, but you did admit that is a reason though,” Janus said.

“Thomas singing through an entire musical out loud with the sides who only he can hear would make him feel crazy,” Virgil cut in. 

“But Thomas has sung with us before though,” Patton said with a frown.

“Yeah, but this isn’t for a Sanders Sides video though,” Virgil said with a shrug. 

“Okay, so we’ll just continue as we planned,” Roman said.

Virgil knew Roman didn’t usually concede so easily after Virgil contributed. He also figured that unfortunately, as much as he hated that Janus was the one to say it, the snake was probably right. Roman wanted to keep singing for Odysseus. Virgil didn’t think there was anything wrong with that though. So he decided not to comment on it. Emile frowned a little but didn’t argue.

“I think Calypso would be a good fit for Patton,” Roman said turning to face him. Patton blinked.

“Oh, really?” Patton asked.

Roman nodded. “Mhm! I think you could match her softness well.”

Virgil had a feeling there was more to this assignment than that though. Calypso portrays herself as loving but is pushy. She insists that being with her would give Odysseus everything he’d need. Patton would never do that in a romantic relationship of course. But there could be some allusions there.  Despite this, Virgil could tell Patton was unsure about this choice though by the look on his face. It was probably her pushiness that made him uncomfortable. He would never encourage trying to break up a marriage after all. Not to mention it wouldn’t be surprising if Patton had read some things fans had said about her time with Odysseus. He wouldn’t want to be associated with that.

So there were similar concerns to what Virgil had with the actions of a character he’d sing for. He probably needed to be reassured that this was just a role and didn’t have real life repercussions. But Virgil wasn’t good at being comforting like that. Not to mention they weren’t as close as they used to be. Thankfully Virgil wasn’t the only one who picked on this conflict. 

“Patton, can you look at me?” Logan asked, using that gentle voice he did when he was reassuring someone of something. 

Patton turned to face him.

“This is only a role. You are still Patton singing a part, a character who is not real and whose actions you do not emulate. Have fun with the singing of course, but this activity is not meant to cause distress,” Logan said. 

Patton took a breath and nodded. 

Emile chimed in, “You also don’t have to do something you don’t want to do.”

Patton seemed to struggle with that one and didn’t affirm the sentiment. Yeah that figured. It was probably something Janus had been trying to help Patton with, as much as Virgil hated the snake side.

Roman blinked.  “Yeah, of course.” He seemed a bit surprised by the attention this was getting.  “It is merely a suggestion. I wouldn’t force you to do anything.”

Virgil imagined Roman had thought of Patton for this to get some satisfaction from it. But well, it was still hard to see Patton distressed. The emotional side probably hated the attention being taken by him like this. Another thing to work through. Not that Virgil liked that either, but he thought he could get away with that more as anxiety. Emotional regulation and care was important. 

“No, it’s-it’s okay,” Patton force a bit of a laugh. “I think I just needed the reminder about this being a part, you know? Probably seems silly.”

Virgil shook his head at that.  “It’s not silly if it distresses you. Trust me, I would know,” Virgil said. He wasn’t always the best with that, but it was still a good reminder to have.

Patton blinked and looked at Virgil. He definitely seemed surprised that Virgil was comforting him. But then he gave him a small grateful smile.  “Right. I am okay singing for her though. It could be fun, I like her singing style,” Patton said.

“And remember, you don’t have to sing for her every time,” Janus added, softer than he usually spoke. Even Janus could get softer when it came to Patton it seemed.  “We can switch things up.”

Patton nodded. “Right.” 

Roman seemed to be waiting around for them to finish with an uncertain look on his face now. When Patton turned back to him, Roman nodded.

“Okay, last we have-oh, we forgot Aeolus, the wind god!” Roman exclaimed.

“I can be them,” Janus said. 

“Yeah you seem playful enough for them,” Roman said as he wrote that down. Janus playfully hissed and winked at Roman. Roman rolled his eyes as he turned back to face everyone.

“So the last parts to assign are from God games. I’ll be Apollo, since Odysseus isn’t in this one.”

“You don’t think it should be Remy?” Patton asked hesitantly. “Since you’re singing a lot and-“

“Gurl I literally don’t care how many parts I got,” Remy interrupted, still casually slurping his coffee. 

Emile frowned at him. “Remy, you didn’t have to interrupt poor Patton. You should apologize for your rudeness.”

Remy groaned dramatically, but he turned to face Patton. He did lift his sunglasses up to look at Patton first though. “Like, sorry,” He said.

“Oh, uh, i-it’s okay,” Patton said. Remy snapped and put his sunglasses back on. Emile sighed but didn’t say anything.

“Right, so Remy’s fine with it.” Roman looked between Virgil and Logan as he hummed. 

“I think Logan would be good for Hephaestus.” 

Logan hummed as he considered this.  “Alright.”

“Aphrodite will be Patton,” Roman said.

“Oh, okay,” Patton said with a smile. 

Roman opened his mouth again and then paused.  “Virgil shouldn’t be two different parts in the same song, so Remus can be Ares,”

“Okay!” Remus exclaimed as he threw his hand up holding his Morningstar. Emile’s eyes widened at seeing the weapon waving around. He scooted closer to Remy. 

Oh right, Emile probably wasn’t used to Remus shenanigans. Let alone seeing a weapon be casually swung around. Remy apparently found it in him to be protective, because he wrapped an around arm Emile. He did seem slightly amused by Remus though, given the way he looked at him. 

“Now for Hera…” Roman tapped his chin as he thought about it.  “Well, I’m already Apollo, so I shouldn’t be Hera…honestly I could see Remy or Janus for this. I’m not sure Remy would get into this one as much as Hermes though.”

“Why’s that?” Virgil asked.

Roman shrugged.  “I don’t know, a different vibe while both dancers. Oh, that’s another reason you couldn’t be Athena, Logan. Cause she would dance in Hera’s part.”

“Ah, I see,” Logan said.

“Logan can dance though,” Patton added.

Logan hmmed. “I do not wish to though.” 

“I think you answered your own question there,” Janus said with a smirk. 

“You’d be fine with dancing?” Roman asked.

Janus shrugged. “I can get into a part, have a good time.”

“Alright then-“

“Hang on,” Virgil raised a hand.  “I thought we were just doing a sing along, why are we talking about dancing?” He asked. Roman smiled at him indulgently. 

“Well, they don’t have to of course. But there are some parts that are hard not to dance to, you know? Don’t worry my dark and stormy knight, this isn’t a performance of any sort,” Roman said with a wink. 

Vigil sputtered a bit but then didn’t respond. Simply nodding. Patton put a hand to his mouth and giggled a bit. Traitor. Logan more looked exasperated at their antics but didn’t comment.  Roman stood up from his seat and clapped his hands. 

“Alright! Is everyone ready?” 

Virgil took a breath. He hoped this would go okay.