1: Burning

Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” is one of my favorite songs of all time. It had profound effect on me from the first time I heard it to today, and back when I was an addict it acted much in the manner of Bukowski’s bluebird: the last, desperate gasps of a deeply beautiful thing that I never had the heart to kill, but that was far too much of a liability for me to be carrying around for everyone to see. Springsteen at once raised the criminal struggles of everyday New Jersey to the realm of high drama with lines like “Man there's an opera out on the turnpike / There's a ballet being fought out in the alley” or “The street's alive as secret debts are paid / Contact's made, they vanished unseen / Kids flash guitars just like switch-blades / Hustling for the record machine”, while simultaneously reducing the usual suspects of his lyrical underworld to their archetypal core.

I found myself entranced by the character of the magic rat, Springsteen's take on Bob Dylan's surrealistic stock characters, such as the protagonists of "All Along the Watchtower". Like the Joker and the Thief, the Magic Rat is archetypal at his core. He is the voice of a million other street poets, musicians, and athletes who were never able to clear enough of the smog from their eyes to see a way past the violence and the struggle. And he is joined by others just like him: the Maximum Lawman, who doesn’t even need a description, so apt is whatever image popped into your head the moment you heard his name. Without doing anything more than naming Barefoot Girl, Springsteen calls forth the images of millions of similar woman whose impulsive streaks and tastes for danger leave them standing beside the ambulance as it pulls off into the night or worse. His jungle is just as real as the thousands of others that we turn our eyes from as we move along the highway, content to let the images of the evening news define our perceptions.

Lyrically, “Burning” is my attempt at a “Jungleland” for the age of drug cartels and gang warfare and financial elites as concerned for the consequences of their actions as they are of the fears and aspirations of their cleaning staff. A world where the poets don’t even try to make an honest stand anymore, but do, on occasion, when no one they might get locked up with is around to listen in, find themselves coming back to an old classic from the days of hair grease and juke joints.

Musically, this is one of the more "straight doomy" tracks on the album, with long stretches of slow riffs as I unfurl my narrative. There's a definite death metal influence on the chorus and the song closes out on a fairly trad-y note.

2: Know Thyself

This song is very much in the tradition of Bathory’s “Enter Your Mountain”, with lyrics that tie mythic images to our individual struggles for meaning. While many overly arrogant modern scholars believe that ancient people used mythology to explain the unknown or as a vague approximation of what we today call history, Quorthon grasped the same truth that Joseph Campbell spent his life trying to convey: that these stories offered blueprints to members of a given culture so that they, as individuals, could embody the very values that sit at the heart of their myths. While the Black Metal community have sometimes struggled to wrap their heads around what Quorthon was aiming at, mistaking his very real yearning for a spiritual and ethical framework that was not corrupted by modern greed and excess for a ham-fisted attempt to start worshiping Odin with the same nauseating literal-mindedness of the Christians that he was pushing back against, a single listen to “Enter Your Mountain” makes his purpose quite clear (and if, for some insane reason, you need more evidence of this truth, you can read a nauseatingly detailed analysis I wrote back before I understood what "less is more" meant.)

Musically, this straddles the line between doom and trad metal, with the opening riff bordering on classic rock territory. This is also the first song where my Gregorian Chant-inspired vocals show up, which is definitely a unique selling point and hopefully an enjoyable one

3: A Hero’s Journey

Joseph Campbell’s writings have been a huge influence on “Songs of the Hungry Ghosts”, and this song is specifically structured around his idea of a monomyth. For those unfamiliar, Joseph Campbell was a scholar of comparative religion who was fascinated by Carl Jung’s ideas of mythology as an expression of the collective unconscious. He undertook a detailed study of world mythology that spanned the full length and breadth of the globe, showing that the same fundamental mythic structures appear in every human society with only minor variations in surface detail. The most compete treatment of the monomyth can be found in Campbell’s magnum opus, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, but you can see a rough sketch of it in this image.

Now one thing that a lot of metal songwriters probably know is that it’s really difficult to write out lyrics about an epic journey over the span of a six minute song. My solution to this problem is similar to what historical documentaries often do when the life of their subject spills out beyond what can be encompassed in a two hour feature. I used Campbell's monomyth as a template and then focused in on key aspects of the myth, some through lyrics and others, like the Apotheosis dual between a guitar and Fender Rhodes, are expressed through music alone.

Musically, this is one of the more adventurous songs on the album, featuring more aggressive leaps between styles as I experimented with the metal subgenres that best encapsulate the different stages of mankind's eternal quest. There's even a black metal section with a Johnny Marr inspired lead overtop, which you definitely don't hear everyday.

4: The Fall of Pistis Sophia

A few years ago I ended up getting really into Gnostic mythology. The Gnostics were a pre-nicene Christian sect that drew much more extensively from Platonic philosophy and Egyptian pagan traditions. They also held that the god of the Old Testament was somewhere on a spectrum from misguided to outright evil, and that Jesus Christ had in fact come to warn us about said deity and encourage us to look towards the Pleroma in the heavens for release rather than the rulers of this material realm. Their mythology was as rich and complex as any you can find, containing a richly allegoric tapestry of stories and ideas designed to guide the practitioner to the highest forms of knowledge of the divine

So here’s a rough summary of the creation myth I drew upon for this story (which was mostly drawn from the texts Pistis Sophia and the Apocryphon of John). Way up above us, things are going pretty fantastic. There’s this whole celestial kingdom where wise, powerful beings go about living a harmonious existence with one another. There are a whole shitload of these beings, which the Gnostics called Aeons, but the three most important for our purposes are the Barbelo, Christ, and Sophia. The Barbelo is the most powerful of the Aeons, and among all life is second only to a being known as the Self Generated, a kind of ultimate divinity. The Christ (which is just a Greek world meaning “The Annointed”) is another incredibly powerful Aeon, while Sophia is a little further down the totem pole (though still a cosmic being whose power dwarfs anything that can be found in this world).

Somewhere far away from this wonderful little place, a malformed being named Saklas looks on with hatred and envy. Having power only over the matter in his shitty little corner of existence, he uses the reflective power of his water to disorient Sophia and lead her into his clutches, where he draws out the sacred light from her body and hoards it all for himself.

But Saklas was never a particularly bright being, and once he finally got his hands on Sophia’s light, he wasn’t even sure what to do with it. Sophia, meanwhile, returns to the Barbelo with news of what had happened, and together they devise a plan to trick Saklas. Realizing that he is attempting a piss-poor recreation of everything he sees in the Self-Generated’s kingdom, they go about creating another class of celestial beings. These beings, called the Adamas (roughly “the primordial Adam”) were created from the light of the Self-Generated, and when Saklas sees what they are doing he immediately imitates them.

This, of course, is all part of the plan. As soon as he uses his stolen light to animate his clay facsimiles, he grants them free will. Now it is a little known fact that the account of creation featured in the biblical story Genesis has an oddly ambiguous set of passages where it appears as though God creates a single, androgynous human being before making up a second batch that he divides between men and women. While most modern Christian and Jewish sources attribute the anomaly to clumsy wording, the Gnostics thought differently. They believed that the moment Saklas created his first, androgynous human, it took one look around and realized that he had come into existence in a flaming shit heap, and immediately rebelled. To solve this problem, Saklas split humanity in half, dividing their positive qualities between two genders so that they would forever be at war with one another and would thus never realize the true source of their suffering.

There is hope, however. According to the Gnostics, the serpent in the Garden of Eden who compelled Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge was none other than the Barbelo, guiding humanity to a true understanding of their circumstances. Likewise for the birds that lead Noah to safety to escape Saklas’ attempts at flooding the world away. While the Barbelo makes a handful of appearances in this world to guide humans away from Saklas, Christ chooses to physically incarnate itself in the body of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. Anyway, “The Fall of Pistis Sophia” tells that same story from Sophia’s perspective.

Musically, this is one leans pretty hard in the doom directions, with a few trad flourishes and some Gregorian Chant for good measure.

5: Tara of the Liberating Knives

I have had the privilege to study under Khensur Rinpoche Lobsang Tenzin, a lama from the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. I was fortunate enough to participate of white White Tara initiation rituals, where practitioners are given the empowerment and instructions to employ the tantric deity in their practice.

During these initiations, just as the ceremony was reaching it’s apex, the Rinpoche would begin a free form group visualization where he would describe White Tara as this vast, cosmic being. The thing that stuck out most to me were the beautiful images used during the visualization componant of the ritual, which, while drawn from a rich collection of source material, were largely improvised on the spot. If you went one time he might describe Tara as celestial divinity with thousands of world systems orbiting around her. Other times he would describe millions of chained hooks shooting out from Tara’s body, slicing through the veils of ignorance and illusion that bind us to our cycles of misery.

Using those images as a starting point, I sketched out my idea for a reverse version of the Rinpoche's transcendent images. A waste land devoid of love and compassion, that, unbenownst to it's tormented inhabitants, stands on the precipace of renewal.

6: Thich Quang Duc

On June 11th, 1963, the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức sat down in the middle of an intersection in Saigon, doused himself in gasoline, and lit himself on fire in protest of the oppressive rule of Catholic President Ngô Đình Diệm. Thích Quảng Đức’s actions that day, and the videos and photographs of the event, had and continue to have a profound impact on my own life.

I couldn’t say when I first encountered the images of his self-immolation, though a good bet would be the standard Vietnam War curriculum of one of my high school history classes. However, like the bamboo plant, whose tendrils spread deep underground before the first sprouts begin to show, those images burrowed into my subconscious and re-emerged firm and immovable years later, at the height of my heroin addiction.

You see, like many addicts, I had developed the unfortunate habit of beating my drug dealers when things looked rough. Before I got clean back in 2017 I’d built up a nicely little list of angry connects who wanted my brains splattered onto the pavement, but because I quite literally preferred death to the substandard dope you got outside the city, I ended up going back into Hartford to cop every day. That meant dodging however many dealers happened to be violently offended by my behavior that week.

Now, as you can probably imagine, having to constantly be on the lookout for people who are trying to end your life is a rather stressful experience. I was living in this animal state of terror, constantly looking over my shoulder, wondering whether every passing car was gonna be the one that did me in. To make things worse, I was homelessat the time, so I didn’t have anywhere safe to go at night, and all of the crack that I was smoking was really honing my issues with paranoia to a knife’s edge, which created a kind of perfect storm that kept me in a state of constant terror, which in turn made me even more desperate and unhinged.

So that was the soil from which the images of Thích Quảng Đức's heroic end blossomed forth. I’d look at the videos of this Vietnamese monk calmly sitting there as his entire body was consumed in flame and I’d compare them to my own jittery dread. I’d fixate for hours on what it was that made this man so utterly calm in the face of that agonizing pain. I was a militant atheist at the time, but in that video I found proof that Buddhist meditation had the power to transform the consciousness to the point that the mind could remain poised and calm even as it was burned alive. Of course, all I really wanted back then was to get rid of the endless fear so I could go on robbing drug dealers without having to confront the consequences of my actions, but it was an important starting point for me, and one that would eventually bear tremendous fruit.

7: The Screams of Dying Children

There is a genocide happening in front of us. It's there on your screen when you reach for your phone in the morning. It is being documented, disseminated, and commented on in real time by perpetrator and victim alike, the details of each atrocity preserved to an extent that has no precident in human history. It is undeniable. I don't think writing a song like this does much, but I have a duty as a human being to do something.

I started off imagining this song as a metallic version of The Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery". I picked the most jarring tempo change I could come up with (95-130bpm) and structured the song around it. I intended to juxtipose a verse that had a dozen voices spread across the stereo spectrum each describing the life and death of one of the victims of the genocide in Gaza, with a chorus that starts with a long, anguished scream. The chorus came out fine, but instead of capturing the chaos of fighting for survival in a ruined city or the sheer magnitude of death that had been inflicted on the young and innocent, the verse just sounded cluttered, so I stripped it down to two lives: Rasha Al Areer and Hind Rijab. When I wrote and recorded this song I wasn't expecting Hind to become the face of Israel's senseless slaughter of Palestinian children, but there's no one in the world more deserving of such veneration.

8: Jets of Blood Coiling Up the Muddy Needle

This song is drawn from my struggles with heroin. Specifically the period at the end of my active addiction in the winter of 2016-2017, when fentanyl first hit the streets and I was living out of a bumperless car trying to dodge a half dozen warrents that were out on me. Sometimes at night it would get so cold that I'd wake up with the withdrawal sweats frozen to my body, and I'd sit there watching the snow fall, understanding just what it was that caused our ancestors to sacrifice their children to dark gods for fear of the wrath of the heavens.

Musically, it's another adventurous one, branching out from doom and trad into atonal piano solos and sparse open sections.