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It`s said that Ludwig Van Beethoven wrote "Ode To Joy" while he was in the midst of deep emotional despair. I was in a bad mood one day so I wrote this.
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The original version of this tune was called "This One" (differentiating it from another tune we were working on called "That One"). When the tune was finished, we felt as though the title needed to reflect the changes the song went through. We felt that calling it "This Too" would be far too obtuse, especially when the other tune, "That One" was scrapped completely.
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If you listen really close, you can hear John Petrucci`s neighbor making renovations to his home. We insisted that he (the neighbor) use a vintage circular saw, for a warmer sound. Jon Finn`s solo is panned slightly to the left, while John Petrucci`s is panned slightly right. Guest vocal appearance by Steven and Ashley Finn.
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As bands go, we are pretty tame when it comes to antics. But if you put four men in a small room for a very long time, a certain amount of misbehaviour is inevitable. Boys will be boys. After working on this song, we came up with a million titles for this song. Most of them were far more politically incorrect than any of us will ever admit. The final title is a shortened version of the worst one.
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One night my son Steven pointed at a star and said, "See that star Daddy? That`s Ashley`s Star." Ashley is his twin sister.
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Pompous Music Suite is a three movement work that is thematic in nature. It`s a bit of a throwback to the days of huge drumsets (that included gongs), keyboard rigs that resemble the bridge of the Enterprise, and an atmosphere when excess was encouraged. If you feel like we eschewed taste and discretion in favor of pompous and overblown "because we can" music, you are right. We did it deliberately. Nyah nyah.
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This title is pretty self-explanatory. While we are big fans of SRV, we felt there would be no point to doing a tribute sound-alike song. It`s been done. Besides, who can top the original? We will never know if what we came up with is accurate to what he would have done, but it was fun to pose the question out loud.
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This is a cover of an old Jeff Beck song. In some ways, it is pretty faithful to the original, except that in the original version Jeff played slide. Jon`s performance attempts to capture the same feeling without using the slide. The band decided to go for a feel that was open and spacious. Many bands choose cover songs as a means to increase accessibility. So of course we chose the most obscure song we could find by a major artist.
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CD Information
