Thank you for your comments!
So yeah, this is an example of something that took so long to complete, that I'm in a very different place now than I was when I wrote it. I composed it in 2011, at age 24, in a "lost" period of my life (recently graduated from college, living at home with parents, working part-time for minimum wage, economy still reeling from the 2008 financial meltdown, in a band that wasn't going anywhere). And you are absolutely correct....this was VERY JCS coded. I was kind of obsessed with the 1970 concept album at this time, and it was a major influence. Started recording the concept album in 2013, and the plan was to release it in 2015, but life got in the way....yadayada.
More importantly, I started playing in pits in 2018, and I think I've told you before, I have learned *a lot* just from playing in pits. I've done 20 musicals now or so? (currently in a run of Lightning Thief) and there are definitely tweaks I would make to the score if I was to stage it today.
Anyway, I'll try and comment on your points directly to clear some things up.
Finding a choreographer and dancers competent to dance it will be tricky. The constant time sig changes and angry pieces set in 5/4 make their job difficult because of the constant wrong footedness.
I should mention that I kind of wrote this as an "Anti-Broadway" show...I'm not sure what better phrase to use. I wanted to deliberately avoid Broadway/West-End tropes as much as possible, and invoke them in deliberate situations. One of those things being dance numbers....I wanted to avoid dancing as much as possible, my vision was having the 'acting' be straight even though they're singing. The only section in the script that has choreography is song 6, Dance of Swords, for the sword fight - my co-writer wrote in the script that the fight should be somehow timed to the music.
But yeah, the proliferation of 5/4 and 7/8 is very much me going "hey, JCS used this, I will too!"
I spotted a few things I'd have changed? The snare at the start has a pretty string ring to it, so doesn't sound that 'military' and the piano tone is a bit strange for my taste.
The field snare I tweaked a bit from the original sound. I listened to recordings of field snares, the problem is mine is a smaller diameter so I had to use some EQ to try and match it to the recordings of larger drums. I considered re-recording it (the field snare was recorded back in 2014) but not sure how much better I could get it today, not to mention I have it tuned much higher now than back then (and the lower sound is what you want). No comment on the piano, it was a grand recorded in a pro-studio, I used numerous reference recordings to get some EQ sculpting, but imo it sounds good to me. (the pianist on the other hand was a sub-par player, but I won't get into that at this time)
Turning the Tide has some nasty guitar fret noise. In that song the vocal tuning is quite shaky in places. The song also has a few 'rules of harmony' issues, that while perhaps appropriate, catch the ear.
Hahaha yes the fret noise does bother me too, but there's really not much I could have done about it - another part recorded back in 2013. At least I didn't compress the guitar on this track. Everybody was run through Melodyne, so not sure where the vocal tuning would have been shaky, but I also never tune to 100%, so who knows?
In Velvet moon a lead break suddenly swamps the vocal.
This happened a couple of times throughout the whole thing, but it was an issue that cropped up during mastering. I went through Massive Mastering, and while overall I'm happy with his work, one of the weird quirks of what he did is that the vocal levels overall got squished down a bit....in the unmastered version, the vocals are louder relative to the music in general. I considered going back and tweaking all the mixes, but the problem is that the computer I mix on is nearly 20 years old and I can only render mixes at half speed, plus my studio is at my parents so its not like something I can just do on a whim. It would have taken me a week or two at least to remix all the vocals, but I was also experiencing burnout after spending like 4-5 months straight mixing. Plus, you know....a 15 year project, I was just ready for it to be done. Endless tweaking rarely does anything any good. You are correct, but it wasn't a big enough problem to me at the time.
I think we wondered about the subject material when you first floated it, but you have done a pretty good job on the writing, although the dialogue/lyrics are a bit over Nordic in some places maybe?
Okay, I kinda hesitate to talk about this in a public space online (I've only told people about this in-person) but I agree with you. My co-writer/lyricist's original lyrics were a bit dense. Note that he is not a native English speaker, he's a French author/poet who also does French/English translations for a living. There were a few Yoda-isms where grammar was flipped, there were word choices that were archaic, and there were some "visual rhymes" where he established a rhyming pattern, but randomly there would be two lines that wouldn't rhyme, but you look at the words they'd appear to rhyme to someone who might not be familiar with the language (for example, "Watch" and "Catch"). What got recorded on the album was actually edits that I largely made to get the lyrics to flow better and to be more hip. Also, I gave the singers freedom to make choices as well, and I remember one singer in particular (Gullveig/Heith) who kept making changes because she kept getting frustrated at the word salad of the original lyrics. Now I'm not throwing Alex under the bus completely....he's a much better lyricist than I (I am not good at lyrics at all), but I think with how young I was at the time, I should have pushed back a bit more in making the lyrics sound more contemporary, which was the whole goal of the project anyway. Regardless, over the years I spent tweaking lines and word choices here and there.
As you said, there still are eccentricities, but I also wanted to preserve his words as much as I could since he did write the story and did all the time on research (once I did float the thought of bringing on another lyricist to do a rework, but that would be too far and too mean and I could never actually do that). I ran the numbers, and 90% of the lyrics are his originals, the 10% my changes or changes done by the singers.
Anyway, my city has a local festival of new theater every April. It was too late to get involved this year, but I am eyeing for next year, a lot of people have been suggesting I bring this to that festival, so I think that's the start. And of course, I would do the appropriate tweaks that I've been wanting to do as well, which should smooth out at least some of the problems you point out.
