“I wanted to do some interesting rhythmic things,” he says. But Vai jettisoned the vocal fairly early on, focusing intently on the music itself. The album’s lead track began life as a vocal tune, essentially a soliloquy by the main character, Captain Drake Mason, laying out the album’s grand concept. I mean, I can break it down and tell you what I was imagining and how I wanted to build the tracks, if you’re interested.” And the first song, ‘The Story of Light,’ is just that for me. So the music all started to come about based on the title. It often happens that things will start to come to you based on what’s on your mind. “I got the title first,” he says, “and I thought about it a lot. In speaking with Vai about The Story of Light, it’s a pleasure to discover the creative processes behind each piece, catching glimpses of his obsessive mind and fearless heart at work. And I did my best to create a record that is true to me, true to my evolution, and something I think that the people who have been following me will get a kick out of.”īut the concept does provide a neat framework for the tracks. It’s just an added bonus if somebody is interested in exploring that kind of stuff. “A lot of people won’t care at all,” he says.
The story itself? The grand concept? Like any true spiritual seeker, Vai isn’t unduly attached. His guitar conjures the epic bliss and vast unfolding vistas of spiritual awakening, the anguish of modern life’s soul-crushing rat race, the terror of apocalyptic cataclysm and the heartbreak of betrayal. And thanks to Vai’s uncanny command of the electric guitar, amplification, effects and all that goes with them, listeners will feel The Story of Light’s emotions far more palpably than they will grasp its story line. The rock instrumental has always been his métier anyway. This time out, though, Vai has chosen to tell his story more through instrumental music than songs with lyrics, with very rewarding results. But he also came of age amid the pomp and circumstance of the Seventies prog-rock era, a time when lengthy concept albums based around spiritual themes were not at all unusual. Vai drew some pretty scalding criticism for the abstruse conceptual abstractions of the first Real Illusions installment, and he isn’t exactly insensitive to criticism. Then they finally experience the core of who they are for a moment.”
They start seeing various actions they performed, they see their past lives, they have these realizations and epiphanies. And when they look into it they see these different layers of themselves. “Throughout the story,” Vai says, “what happens is people come into this place where they look into this reflecting pond. It’s essentially Vai’s take on the magic mirrors and enchanted ponds of mythology, fairy tales, sci-fi and other stories-symbolic portals between the ordinary world and a realm of sprit, imagination and self discovery. The Story of Light takes the form of 12 dazzling guitar compositions that portray visions and realizations experienced by different characters in Vai’s narrative when they gaze into a reflecting pond that’s central to the plot. Technically, The Story of Light is the second installment of Vai’s Real Illusions trilogy, which began with the Reflections album in 2005.
0 kommentar(er)
