Hey, all.  This is Will Crosswait.  I'm just gonna ramble on about the making of this album because I've got a few minutes and this band/album means a lot to me personally.  If this sounds boring, I won't be offended in the slightest, go ahead and check out some other parts of this site, or maybe listen to the album over under the Music tab.  Take care!

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Alright, if you've read this far, you might actually wanna hear some insight into the songs on this album.  Here's my unedited commentary about the album (that means I was too lazy to proofread it, not that I'm cussing, by the way).  I'll dive right in.  Starting with...

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Close Calls (CC)- Alex and I wrote this song early on, probably early in our freshman year.  I remember he came to me with an incredibly difficult guitar riff.  He had some lyrics to a chorus too, but he wanted my help constructing some verses.  I loved the riff, and asked him to just keep repeating it.  I pulled out some lyrics I had been working on a few months earlier and, bam, we had two verses.  We strung a guitar solo in there, lay down a sick bass line and called it done.  That's what you hear today.  Side note: listen to the bass/drum lines during the guitar solo.  After practice one day, Nathan and I stayed behind to work through that section.  We each wrote a cool fill, then  swapped and made the other emulate the rhythms his own instrument.  That's why, in the background, you hear us both flipping out a couple times. 

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Undertow (U)- This is one of my prouder accomplishments.  I wrote this song after I bought a Finger Eleven song.  I played it, enough to hear just two notes, then quickly paused the song.  In my mind, I had quickly came up with a groovy bass solo, out of nowhere, that started with those two notes.  I stopped the song before I could become influenced by it; I wanted this song to be as original as possible.  I ran downstairs and recorded the bass solo (it's the one you hear after the first chorus).  Then, that afternoon, I locked myself in the basement and just cranked away at the song until I had finished it.  The scratch track that's under the Music tab is the final product of that day. 

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Taming the Beast (TtB)- The first song I ever wrote by myself (Undertow was the second).  I wrote it about the TV show Chuck after watching way too many episodes in one day.  The show and the song are about spies.  If you watch the show, you'll have a bit more insight into the lyrics... So go watch it! It's cancelled now (so sad), but the DVDs are out there.  GO!

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Jolly Day (JD)- This song was written by Alex.  The cool thing about this song is that the verse and the chorus sections are in two totally different keys, which shouldn't actually sound good together, but he somehow makes it work.  I just love how inspirational his lyrics can be, while talking about such depressing circumstances.  It's a great combination.

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Helplessness (H)- I wrote this song about a girl.  'Nuff said.  But, come on, how awesome does Nicky's voice sound on this thing?  There's a reason he's the "choirboy" of Exit 18.  This is the kind of song where his voice really shines.  Funny story, when Nathan and I recorded the scratch track of this song (the skeleton of the song upon which all the other tracks are put down), we forgot to tune my guitar... In another stroke of brilliance, we recorded Nicky's vocals right on top of the wrong key guitar.  Now both we off by a half step.  But, since we're such intelligent musicians, we made sure that Alex's guitar (and mine, I think I played rhythm guitar on this song when Alex solos...) was tuned perfectly when we lay down the guitar track(s).  So, if you listened to our demo (a pretty bad CD we hastily released sophomore year), you can hear how bad Nicky sounds, even though he sang perfectly.  We fixed it, painstakingly, and had to record a bunch of other tracks.  But at least we learned from it.  FYI, that's Lincoln's gorgeous harmonies on the chorus (and my harmonies, somewhat buried in the mix cuz they're quite frankly not as good).  Since Lincoln arrived on the scene so late, we didn't get to add as much vocal tracks as we could so this is the only one where he gets to sing.  However, he's a great vocalist and a great songwriter too.  Just wanna put that out there.

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Battle Wounds (BW)- This is a song Alex wrote during his in-and-out of the band stage.  The words and music are incredible and I'm honored to be able to help flesh out the song in the studio.  I ended up writing taglines to the first two verses, to make them as long as the third and I think they fit the tone pretty well.  Nicky's doing harmonies, while I'm singing the melody, which is a weird flip-flop of our usual sound.  The instrumentation is pretty different than our usual sound as well and, to spice up the ending, I threw in a random keyboard solo.  Honestly, the chords and melody of this song are just so... writeable.  They make you wanna sit down on an instrument and just solo for an hour.  At least, that's my opinion.  We might throw down an acoustic version of this song at some point.  It works really well. 

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Jazz and Superglue (J+S)- I'm really happy with the way this song turned out.  Alex wrote the chorus while I wrote the verses.  We were in the studio, practicing the song with the band, and we really didn't know where to end it.  Alex's dad and my dad had both come down to listen to the end of our practice and they threw around the idea of ending the song with a repeated phrase.  I happened to have the line "It's all about the wind (gold, glory?)" written down in my ideas notepad, as a possible springboard to a new song, but the line happened to fit the song really well.  Nathan had the brilliant idea to get louder with each repetition.  I think his exact words were "the third time, we want them to think that we can't get any louder, and then get even louder the last time."  Or something like that.

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Dream World (DW)- I think Alex brought this song "to the band" (our term for bringing a song to the other guys in the band to help finish writing and become a part of Exit 18's setlist) around the same time as Jolly Day.  His riff in this song is sick.  I really don't get how he comes up with all of these perfect guitar licks all the time.  Jazz and Superglue, Dream World, Close Calls... So good...  Another little tidbit- Nathan usually records his drum lines on an octopad, a rectangular pad that you hit with drumsticks to get sounds into the studio.  We do this because we can't afford the amound of mics required to mic a full drum set.  So, for a few select songs, we went to my church and used a MIDI drum set, with only a few cymbals that we had to mic.  All the other drums on the set can connect directly to the computer we use to record.  Nathan recorded these drums on a full kit.  Meaning that the end of that "stop dreaming" section where the drummer effectively explodes?  Yeah, Nathan did that in real time, on a real drum kit.  What up. 

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Too Late Too Soon (TLTS)- Here begins a section of songs that could, pretty accurately be called "Nathan and Will goof around and end up writing a bunch of cool songs."  This is the first one we wrote together, Nathan supplying the words with my melody and chords.  We tried to capture how the song sounded when we first wrote it, down in Nathan's basement banging on guitars and eating really yummy plentiful snacks.  Good times...

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Keep 'em Talkin' (KeT)- Nathan and I co-wrote this song when Nate came to me with a cool guitar riff that he wrote (unusual because Nathan's a drummer).  I decided that the riff was too happy, and immediately proceeded to supply him with the darkest, most heavy chords to go with the riff.  Oh, yeah, and they were in the wrong key.  Alex and I tend to care less about key signatures than most people... Anyway, Nathan liked the sound of it, so we proceeded to write lyrics together.  We ended the afternoon with a pretty sick song.  It's one of our favorites on the album. 

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Man the Guns (MtG)- I wrote this song mainly as an exercise in writing blues.  At this point, I was a bit sad because I was convinced that, since most of the sweet blues licks have been used by the countless number of blues musicians before me, I would never be able to come up with an original one.  So, after exhausting all of the standard blues guitar patterns, I resorted to an old songwriting trick I came up with while writing for Exit 18: pick random patterns on the guitar fretboard.  After a bit of experimenting, I had the guitar riff that's prominent in the verse.  Nathan had the great idea to have the bass and guitar go back and forth with the riff, while playing the chords in between.  I think it works really well.  Listen for the vibraslap- Nathan played it as a joke, but it really goes well in the song. 

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Meaning of Life (MoL)- I know, the title of this song is really pretentious, but hear me out.  First of all, I am not attempting to define The Meaning of Life.  If anything, I'm trying to say that this is different for every individual person.  Moving on...  The idea for this song first came to me in the shower.  It's a total clique, but for some reason, right before you go to sleep and while you're in the shower are the two best times to come up with song ideas.  It's because they're places where your mind is the most empty, allowing your subconscious to take over and be awesome.  The idea was the line "Give me the meaning of life, give me the meaning of fantasy."  Obviously, I must have been listening to Queen earlier that day, but I digress.  Once I had that line written down, I immediately put it out of my mind for a really long time.  By the time I came back to it, I was reading some lyrics that Alex had written down and left at my house.  These were the lyrics that start "I can't really remember anything from last night..."  I was hooked on them and I wanted to turn them into something great.  The idea just popped into my head: I wanted to make a huge anthem that ties in song ideas from everyone in the band and wraps up the album.  I started writing sections of the song to go after and before Alex's words.  I basically ransacked my entire song ideas notepad to do so.  I pretty much forced Nathan and Nicky to write lyrics to go in with the song, but I think they understood that I was on a quest.  I don't exactly remember when I got the idea to put every single song in the album on top of each other, but I remember being obsessed.  If you actually listen to the entire song, you can hear excerpts from every song on the album, played on top of each other, at the end of MoL (the short hand version of this song's name that I used while making the album).  Side Note: Will K plays ukulele on this song, dueling me on another uke right before Alex raps.  Also, the recording of this song marks the first time Lincoln ever soloed on keys.  Check it out, he rock it. 

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Melatonin (M)- I wrote this song about sleep deprivation.  Writing it is where I developed my "pick random shapes on the guitar fretboard" stratagem.  The chords make a diamond shape, which is literally the only reason I chose them.  (For music theory peeps, this is the tonic, B, minor third, and perfect fifth)  They sound good though, which is why I kept them.  Alex did me the honor of writing the chorus words and the bridge.  I love writing songs with that man.

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And... I guess that's it.  Thanks for reading and listening.  It makes me feel a little less self-indulgent about my music. 

Love and Blessings,

Will