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“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” – William Shakespeare
When writing fandom music, I find there is very often a clear song idea hiding among the standout scenes of an episode; I think of it like trying to assemble the pieces of a puzzle. For some of my other Year Four songs (“Assignment Earth,” “And the Children Shall Lead”), I had an immediate idea of what I wanted to write about. With “By Any Other Name,” there were several interesting bits of plot and character that could have been made into songs (not to mention the ridiculous notion of the energy barrier around the galaxy and nearly all of the Enterprise crew members being turned into D20’s). Still, this particular episode is one of my childhood favorites, along with the likes of “Tomorrow is Yesterday” and “The Corbomite Maneuver,” so I wanted to do it justice.
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Did I set out to write the most controversial songs on each of our albums? No. It just seems to happen. Whether it is a song that repeats “kick his ass” 32 times, a rap song that drops the S-bomb multiple times, or even a song about prostitute murder, I just wrote them because it is what I heard in my head and what felt right. They just ended up being the edgiest lyrically. In this case, it was truly unintentional.
It’s always interesting to discuss with band mates what we thought would show up in the lyrics, and ultimately, what got left out. Mike was sure I would use Kirk’s rousing speech about risk, but that had never been on my radar. This was a love story. Two people deeply in love and committed to each other, having been physically separated for eons. They borrow some of the crews’ bodies temporarily to build androids for themselves, but they have to resist the temptation to stay in the human bodies, despite the rediscovered physical and sensual temptations of those bodies (“Can robot lips do this?”). In the end, the lovers do the right thing and return the physical bodies back to their owners and choose to “depart into oblivion” together, knowing love is just not limited to a physical manifestation.
Welcome to the first in a series of articles related to the upcoming release of Year Four. For the next sixteen weeks, we’ll be talking about each song from the new album, telling the stories about how they came to be, what they mean to us, and the process we went through to write them. It’s a grand new experient where our fans get to hear the stories, so you feel like you know the songs before you even hear them! So let’s get started with the first track from Year Four, A Private Little War.
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