Song Origins: Everything Evil
I looked around and all I saw was everything evil
Elephant Stone released a new single, Everything Evil, on March 25th. From looking through my voice memos, the seed of this song goes back to Sunday, September 22, 2024. This most likely happend after my morning expresso when I popped into my home studio for 15 minutes or so. That’s pretty much my daily ritual: a glass of lemon water, expresso, then head down to the home studio to see what the moment brings.
Pretty basic rock riff but with a nice descending chromatic intro. Also, I almost always start with gibberish lyrics (Wikipedia calls them “non-lexicable vocals”). I think Adriano Celentano - ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’ is the gold standard for this.
I returned the next day and recorded the following.
As you can hear, I picked up the tempo, changed the key (I reckon to hit my vocal sweet spot) and found a chorus. A week later, on September 30th, I recorded an updated version with the middle eight, including me vocalizing a guitar solo. Still no lyrics.
From there, I let my subconscious do the heavy lifting and spent a lot of time with 70s punk. I think The Saints’s “(I’m) Stranded” ended being a pretty heavy influence on the direction of the tune.
Around that time, MIEN announced our second album MIIEN, which kept me fairly occupied and pulled me away from the demo. But as has become routine over the last few years, I used the Christmas break to write new music and finally nail down all the lyrics, family time included, of course.
The working title was “All I See Is Evil,” but my wife Kirsty suggested “Everything Evil” would hit harder. She was right.
I’ve written a lot of protest songs over the years. Bombs Bomb Away, Masters of War, Knock You From Yr Mountain, the list goes on. As I mentioned in my last post, songwriters are empaths. We process everything around us, and sadly, there’s a lot of evil to process right now. Writing this song was therapy, pure and simple. I have to believe we can fight it and overcome.
With the lyrics finally done, I bashed out a punchy, punk-rock version of the tune, mandatory noise guitar solo included, all played by yours truly.
And that’s pretty much how it went. Thanks for making it all the way to the end.
Until the next Song Origins.
om shanti om. rishi.