A new world in sight
I didn't know this song would one day become the title track Sunset In Our Eyes of the new album, but I did know it was probably going to be one of the longest songs.
As an avid Prog Metal fan I always loved epic songs which took their time to expand on themes and develop melodies in the course of the song. Naturally, I wanted to have one of these songs on my album, so this time I laid out the song to become a little more epic. I knew the song was going to have a recurring main theme, but I didn't want it to repeat too often. The song ended up pretty diverse, with three main sections:
1. the starting section with the refrain,
2. the middle section with some crazy interludes and
3. the final section with the recurring theme.
This song logically turned out to be the most time-consuming to make. Not only because it is long per say, but because it is so diverse over the course of its length. Compositorial effort doesn't scale linearly with the length of the song, because to me it is diversity that makes or breaks a longer song, not endless repetition. Each part needs to be special to be meaningful in a song. Consequently, there are barely any loops that repeat multiple times, every note and beat is hand-crafted to be in this specific place. The song really became a rollercoaster ride of melodies, rhythms and emotions.
In terms of instrumentation, it is first to introduce the Taiko drum ensemble, which has further appearances on the later songs on the album. One of my main goals for this album was to make a crossover of Metal and various other genres. One important inspiration for me was the wonderful Battlestar Galactica soundtrack by Bear McCreary. I absolutely loved the elegant combination of multiple instruments from various musical genres into a very unique combined sound and I wanted to have this in my music as well.
