Re: The Ninth Wave

[nomad@mercury.interpath.net (- Personal Account)]

Here's a clip from a file in one of the Kate FTP sites.  This is suppossed
to be in Her words.  Sorry about the length of this post. 


[begin quote]
This side is about someone who is in the water alone for the night.
"And Dream Of Sheep"is about them fighting sleep, they're very tired and
they've been in the water waiting for someone to come and get them and
it's starting to get dark and it doesn't look like anyone's coming and
they want to go to sleep.  They know that if they go to sleep in the
water they could turn over and drown so they're trying to keep awake but
they can't help it, they eventually fall asleep which takes us into the
second song.

The second song is called "Under Ice" and is the dream that the person
has.  They're skating on ice; it's a frozen river and it's very white
everywhere and they're all alone, there doesn't appear to be anyone else
there.  As they skate along they look down at the ice and they can see
something moving underneath.  As they skate along with the object that's
moving under the ice they come to a crack in the ice and as it moves
under the crack they see that it's themselves in the water drowning and
at that moment they wake up into the next song which is about friends
and memories who come to wake them up to stop them drowning.

As they wake up and surface they are coming out of the whole feeling of
deep subconsciousness.  One of the voices tells them there's someone
there to see them and here in the water is a witchfinder.  This is a
sort of nightmare they're having and this monster figure is basically
trying to drown them, trying to see if they're innocent or guilty and if
they drown then they're innocent.  If they don't drown they're guilty so
they'll be drowned anyway and it's the trial of this girl who's in the
water and all she wants to do is survive and keep her head above water.
This song was written through a guitarist -- Alan Murphy -- the track
would have had the wrong feel with a keyboard instrument.  All he had to
work to was the drum track and I tried to hum and point patterns out and
everything he came up with sounded great; we spent the day building up
the guitars and built vocals, Fairlight, sequencers over the top.
Thanks for that Al.

The next song is about how she wants to go home, that's really the thing
she wants most, just to be in the cosy atmosphere of her belongings all
around her and the security of those four walls and the firm ground and
being with the one that she loves.  She finds that she's there in spirit
and there's her loved one sitting in a chair by the fire, but she hadn't
conceived the idea that she wouldn't actually be there in real terms,
she's not real and although she can see her man, he can't see her, she
can't communicate with him in any way, it's more of a nightmare than
anything so far because this is the closest she's been to any kind of
comfort and yet it's the furthest away.

The next song is "Jig Of Life".  This is about the future self who comes
to her rescue basically -- she says look, I'm the next part of your life
and if I am going to survive and enjoy the things that I've enjoyed;
having my children, my happy home and my husband then you've got to keep
it together, you've got to stay alive, you musn't drown or I will drown
with you.  It's the future begging her, pleading with her to let her,
the future lady live.

The song after that is "Hello Earth" and is really the point where she's
so weak she relives the experience of the storm that took her into the
water.  Almost from a view looking down on the earth up in the heavens
watching the storm start to form that eventually took her and has put
her in this situation.

This track features orchestral arrangements by Michael Kaman.  It was
wonderful working with Michael, he's a very receptive person to work
with and the orchestral arrangements that he did for the tracks I felt
were very atmospheric.  It was wonderful for me to watch the layers of
this song go on one by one.  It initally had to be written with the
verses symbolizing the storm gradually building and the choruses having
a great sense of space and atmosphere and this I always hoped to be a
male choir.  When I first wrote "Hello Earth" I was very much inspired
by a male choir that I'd heard in Herzog's film "Nosferatu" and although
the versus are a very different piece of music, it was all designed
hopefully to eventually link into this male voice choir which would take
us to a very different place in the song.  They really are meant to
symbolize the great sense of loss, of weakness at reaching a point where
you can accept at last, everything can change.

This takes us into "Morning Fog" and "Morning Fog" is the symbol of
light and hope; it's the end of the side and if you ever have any
control over endings they should always, I fell, have some kind of light
in there.  This was originally written to a Linn drum machine and I
wrote, on the Fairlight, an instrumental piece of music using the sample
of an acoustic guitar.  I then later wrote the song on top of this
instrumental building up the voices in layers.  The piece I'd written on
the Fairlight was transcribed by Dave Lawson for an acoustic guitar
player and I felt that really one of the best people to play this was
John Williams, a superb classical guitarist and who I had met on a
couple occasions before when I was working at Abbey Road and it seemed
like the perfect opportunity to ask him if he'd like to play on the
track.  We added Del's fretless bass, Kevin on synth, built up the
backing vocals and Pad layered up "Appalachian" fiddles and Fujare.  We
kept the guide vocal as the master voice and mixed up the last track on
the album.

[end quote]