Track By Tracks: Dust Prophet - One Last Look Upon The Sky (2022)


1. A Storm of Time & Space part 1:

This is a simple piece of music Sarah and I created, initially for another project. It’s inspired by the song Maggot Brain from the album of the same name by Funkadelic. Eddie Hazel was such an amazing guitar player. His sense of timing and choice of notes is on another level. I found it incredibly inspiring. Sarah wrote & performed the piano part and set the tone for how the piece would flow. It allowed me to let myself go while playing the guitar parts. This was originally one full song but for the album we decided to split bit into two tracks so we could have moments of levity over the course of the album.

2. When the Axe Falls:

I’m a huge True Crime fan, and I have a particular interest in unsolved crimes. I was reading The Man From The Train by Bill James and his daughter Rachel. One of the crimes they cover is The Axeman of New Orleans. It’s such a bizarre and twisted affair. I thought it would be a cool subject for a song. Sarah wrote the majority of the riffs, and it all came together fairly quickly once the three of us jammed on it for a bit. For me personally, this is one of my favorites to play live. This song was released as a single a few months ago and it premiered through Decibel Magazine, which is incredible for a small band like us! It’s the second time they premiered one of our songs (Hourglass was the first) and we are extremely grateful for it.

3. Dear Mrs. Budd:

This is about Albert Fish, AKA The Gray Man. More specifically it’s about his abduction and murder of Grace Budd. The crime is horrific and it makes my heart break for her parents. Fish himself is a fascinating person. He had such a tragic upbringing and developed so many weird fetishes…like pushing metal needles into his rectum. He’s a good case study for the “nurture vs nature” argument. Musically this song consists of riffs I had written many years ago. I had the off-time parts already penned out and it was just a matter of figuring out how all the pieces fit together.

4. Put To The Question:

Another song that started with Sarah. She wrote the primary riffs for the entire song. She essentially brought a completed piece to practice one day, and then it was just a matter of all of us jamming on it and fleshing the arrangements out. Lyrically I based the lyrics on the procedure of using torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition. Anyone and everyone was fair game when it came to being accused, even other members of the church. If you were “put to the question” it meant you would be tortured until you confessed your sins. The lyrics are telling the interaction between the accuser and the accused. The “come dance with me…” parts are the person being accused telling their punisher how they will have revenge in the afterlife.

5. Song 4:

This is an instrumental piece that came about from us randomly jamming one day. We’re big fans of Karma to Burn. In the early days of the band, we actually considered being an all-instrumental band before I decided to take a stab at the vocals. The title of the song is our own little tribute to Karma to Burn as they primarily used numbers for song titles. And coincidentally it was also the 4th song we wrote together.

6. The High Capital:

The opening doom riff was written by Sarah, and I wrote the heavy palm muted riff that plays during the verse and chorus. Tyler’s drumming helped to shape it and added the downstroke inflection when playing the guitar riffs. This ended up being our very first single that was released in 2021.

I’m a fan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and I think the story about Lucifer’s fall is very compelling. I have this book in a couple of different versions including a graphic novel. As many times as I’ve read Paradise Lost, I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.

7. A Storm of Time & Space part 2:

The other half that was created from track number 1. Again, this was originally one combined song. But we wanted to have a couple of more somber interlude sections within the album.

8. Hourglass:

Not to sound like a broken record but this yet another song that started with riffs written by Sarah. She brought this to practice one day. She actually had written all of the riffs used in this song but they weren’t originally in the order they currently are in. If my memory is correct I think we had a general idea about *how* we wanted the parts to flow together but it took some work to get the changes to flow properly. This ended up being our second single, which was released on New Year’s Eve 2021. It premiered on Decibel Magazine which was a huge honor for us! Lyrically it’s about Bram Stoner’s Dracula but more specifically the sub-text of eternal love, and the pain of longing for that love that so many of us have experienced.I can relate to the anguish of having your heart broken; of losing the person you love so much that it feels like part of your soul has died. So yeah, Dracula was the overarching inspiration, but it’s wrong to say the song is *about* Dracula. Because it’s not.

9. Bury Me Before Noon:

This is probably our heaviest song. As you might have guessed from my comments on The High Capital, I like stories from the Bible that focus on apocalyptic events and the end of the human race. The opening chanting part is, according to Aleister Crowley, what Adam recited to open a portal to Hell, when Christ descended into its depths for the 3 days between when he was crucified and when he was resurrected. I thought it was a cool idea for a song.

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