Poets of the Fall – Games songs

I have been meaning to write a bit more… and I did but elsewhere. The past few days though, I have been listening intently to my new Poets of the Fall playlist and I caught myself holding my breath again. I say again because it had not happened for a while. Don’t get me wrong, I still got touched by everything that makes Poets of the Fall… well… Poets of the Fall; I just needed some other horizon for a while – less Poets, more… others.

New playlist… Again!?

Well, yeah… I mean I get bored easily, so I need to spice things up or tone them down a little. This one is mild with a dash of drama… I play this mostly all the time, at home when I am writing, when I am about to fall asleep, at work when I gotta focus and think hard, in the car to and from work. Hence the need to change the playlist quite often. In this particular set, there are only incredible songs… right, ok… so which one have I not talked about, hmm, written about? Many and none…

Contrary to the band, I don’t really play games… Alan Wake, Max Payne and such, I have never played it/them. The only games I play involve words and puzzles… so, Late Goodbye having been created for Max Payne 2, I could never connect to it. Call it prejudice if you will, but I do love the song… and even more now actually, for more than one reasons – other than it is a great hit ?. The other song was released for the game Alan Wake and is called War. Yet another title that I could not connect to although I must say it has blown my mind from the start, go figure…

Now, I hear you… please don’t bite my head off just yet. There is a story to every line, in this case to every song. I could not find it… the connection… because, since I had not played the games, I read about them instead and tried to guess what the songs were about based on the videos. I did not get much luck with that strategy, I must admit. All the while, I did – and still do – enjoy these two songs. If I did not, they would not have made my playlist… ?

So, how did I turn it around… how did I get the meaning behind the words and the moods for these two songs to take my breath away, today again as I was driving home? I stopped trying I think. I went with the flow, and let the songs carry me wherever… mostly a different censorial plane every time. War and Late Goodbye have become these organic experiences that I have been meaning to talk to you about without knowing that I did.

War – Twilight Theater

Musically speaking, this song is amazing… it is slowly building and bringing you along if you don’t take care. Marko‘s singing here is flawless… I mean, if there was ever a word that meant “better than flawless”… oh wait, but there is… perfect ? I don’t care that perfection does not exist, when he sings it sure does. I follow the wave on that song and I let it carry me where my heart races, and my eyes get teary and my senses get confused. Overwhelming is yet another word I am looking for, because suddenly the lyrics make perfect sense… It is telling me what I already know, mind you. I am not alone… whatever the obstacle, the fight, the war… I am never fighting alone, and my loved one does not fight on his own either. It is a sad song, or a melancholic one maybe… or it is really? No matter what, the hope shines through it all, both in the lyrics and the orchestration, and it is so majestic that it grabs at everything. My visualisation is something like this, the abstract part of the struggle… first, within… then push forward, struggle some more, undo the knots, push forward and feel the wind in your back… helping out… then the more concrete part where you can touch your helping hand, hear him and talk, laugh and push forward together. This is what War is to me, it lifts my spirit greatly even if it can make me cry like crocodile ?… or a baby.

So will you please show me your real face
Draw the line in the horizon
Cos I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought

Late Goodbye – Signs of Life

Not the same high… but the acoustic version gets me every time (although not the version on my playlist). When I hear the first notes of that song, I see Marko on stage, looking right at me and saying something like “our very first song” to me in a “as a matter of fact” way… as if I did not know or something. Wait maybe he was talking to the woman behind me, pushing me so much I had pain in my back ?. Oh well, Late Goodbye is loaded with emotions and it is particularly noticeable when they play it live. No way I could relate to the lyrics though, at the same time, he might be singing about loss… any kind (in both songs actually). It is very graphic, even in the lyrics, so there is very little space for interpretation or extrapolation… hmm at 1 min 15 in the song the cords, like a hook forcing you along.

The devil grins from ear to ear when he sees the hand he’s dealt us […]
Till’ in the john mirror you stare at yourself grown old and weak

Last words for tonight

One of you told me recently that you had never experienced this kind of fandom with a band before… the craving of seeing the band live, over and over… We all feel this, more or less intensely, and none of us I believe can truly explain it. There is a sort of addiction to the music; an addiction to the way it makes us feel… bonus – if need be – you get loads of new friends in the process. The Poets of the Fall effects… not just a metaphor.

Night-y night readers ?