Mad Henry

Robert James

There’s a lot of weirdness going on here.

First, King’s X has a song on their Dogman album called “Go to Hell”. It’s 30 seconds long and it’s balls to the wall and just when you start to feel the groove it ends. I thought I might try something like that. Fast, loud, and over before it goes anywhere. That didn’t end up happening with this song, but that was one of the ideas.

Second, GarageBand for iOS doesn’t have a lot of options as far as time signatures go. I wanted to do something in an unusual time, but I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting for my mother’s appointment to end and I didn’t have my MacBook on me. So I just did some math. Eight bars of 6/4 time is the same number of beats as 12 bars in 4/4. So I set the segment to 12 bars of four and just played something that felt like 6. It worked. Hooray. Then I tried to replace the original drums using the OSX GarageBand’s Drummer function. All the fills were in the wrong place. I spent 3 minutes messing with it before deciding to just use the original drums. I did change the sounds though.

Third, as 50/90 approaches the end of the second month, lyrics are getting hard to come by. Even when I do have a subject to write about they are just hard to put together. I had an idea for forcing inspiration. I would look up old New England folklore and write lyrics based on those stories. That song is my first attempt. The story is about a guy who, backed with some zombie muscle, kidnapped his crush from her wedding. Not before killing the groom, of course. It’s a nice family friendly tale.

Here’s a link to the story:
http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2009/08/black_magic.html

The guitars here are all Les Paul.

Mad henry lived on the edge of town
black magic darkness all around

Young Rachel caught mad henry’s eye
Now Geoffrey’s going to have to die

He carried Rachel out to the night
He took her and kept her just out of spite

She held the knife
that took his life

Then Geoffrey’s bride
Lay down and died