Deconstructing Year Four: Day of the Dove

Day of the Dove is the only track on Year Four that I traded for. I knew that I wanted it, because it is the last appearance of Klingons in the original series, unless you count the fake Klingon in The Savage curtain.

I knew that I wanted to do a follow-up to my Trouble with Tribbles song, and because it falls at the end of the album, Day of the Dove was perfect. I knew that something wacky and experimental like this would work better towards the end instead of the beginning. Day of the Dove LaughWe had so much fun creating my Tribbles song that I wanted to do it again. I also wanted to include Patrick vocally this time, so we brought in Kang, the Klingon Captain from Day of the Dove, as a new member of the Klingon gang. I also thought it would be fun to continue the story of the characters from the first song and show the listeners how they have progressed since Tribbles.

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There is one major thing that I did different with this track that we have never done before in a Five Year Mission song. Each member of the band got to write their own verse, and everyone was involved in creating the backing track and mixing the song. That would have been a great undertaking on its own, even without it being the last thing that we worked on right before sending the album off. Doing all of this under a time crunch made it much more challenging. I was really impressed with each of the other guys’ verses. They were far more than what I expected. I’m really proud of these guys that I get to make music with.

The final version of the song that you hear on the album is actually a little bit shorter than the original full length mix. Once everyone had written their versus and we got everything recorded, the song clocked in at over six minutes. I had to cut a few things to make it a reasonable length. While five minutes is pretty epic for this type of song, I did not want to sacrifice anything else. We may put out an extended remix at some point, so that fans can hear everything that we did.

I hope fans of The Trouble with Tribbles #4 will enjoy this continuation.

Five Year Mission
Year Four
Day of the Dove
Written by Mike Rittenhouse (with contribution from 5YM)

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