I'm posting Song Descriptions for all the songs of Bare Bones to provide a bit more perspective. I'm starting with the oldest song and working my way up. Here's the first one:
Captain & Crew
This is the oldest song on the album. I wrote it back in 2003. When I began writing the lyrics for this it was all about imagery; military submarines, torpedoes, fear of battle, navy operations... But I also wrote it for other reasons. - Life is like a game of chess. It's like you send your pawns out to battle, sometimes moving them into the line of fire. You take risks. Sometimes you win and sometimes you fail. Sometimes you keep moving that Knight 2 spaces over and 3 spaces down, then back again... then in the other direction... and then something catches you off guard and your opponent takes out your Rook. "I didn't see it! It's not my fault!" you say, but really, it is. The key is, we must stay accountable for all our actions and admit when we've made a mistake. Chess is a really hard game but then again, so is life. There are a lot of pieces you have to think about all at once. We are all the "Captain" or the "King" at one time or another and it is in these situations, where we should be the most self aware.
Do you know what it's like when you've got a problem and you're at the point when you're damned if you do and damned if you don't? That's when the opponent's Bishop is lined up on a perfect diagonal to take out your King, and if you move it out of harm's way, the wrath of the Queen will fall upon you. If only you had thought it out better in the first place. It's way too late. Now It's checkmate, but you'll do better next time. At least you'll try harder anyway.
In my last band, we used to play this song quite a bit and every time we did, the song got longer. We called it our "epic." I think it was about 10 minutes long by the end. For this recording, I trimmed it back down a lot, however it's still almost 6 minutes. That little instrumental bit at the end is the torpedo coming, and then blowing the submarine to smithereens!
