Studio Notes & Comments: At close to seven minutes long, this complex, prog-metal(ish) epic was our most ambitious effort so far......demonstrating once more the refreshing diversity of our music (or that we can't make our minds up what we want to sound like?!). I actually started writing all the seperate bits that eventually made up this piece in about April 1999, but it took several months to fit it all together. The complexity of the arrangement was a severe challenge for 4-track recording (more bounces than the pogo-stick world championships!), but we just about pulled it off! It was also a big challenge for me; as it had lots of keyboards on it.....with several very different sections that required actual lead lines, not just simple chord patterns as featured on previous EY songs. I dread to think how many recording hours went into getting the keyboards down for this one!!
I actually worked on this as a side, solo project and had the complete instrumental arrangement down on disc before Jimmy ever heard it. I had a pretty good idea in my head as to how the vocals would sound and what the lyrical theme would be (the catastrophic legacy of Christianity) and then Jimmy went away and wrote something completely different (a rock-operetta about a condemed prisoner!). This alternative approach actually worked better that what I had had in mind and most amazingly of all, "Time Will Tell" suits Jimmy's voice extremely well and represents what is probably his best vocal performance on an EY song to date........even 'though I wrote the music in complete isolation from him
The song begins with an acoustic guitar-based section (accompanied by lead guitar and keyboards) that has a Dream Theater/Rush sort of feel to it. The lead guitar melts rather nicely into the opening vocals (the prisoner reflecting on his prediciement), which then proceed atmospherically into part II. The acoustic guitar continues (now playing the basic chord structure of Part III), but this is overlayed with a lead guitar solo with plenty of wah-wah pedal employed and the character is switched to "Jack the Hangman" who obviously enjoys his work (a very strong vocal here too!).
The electric guitar takes over for Part III, playing a sequence that sounded sort of Van Halen-esque while I was working on it, but with the rest of the arrangement, it sounds more like....well.......like something else! There's also a synth riff that was very tricky for me to play (since I can't really play keyboards as such; lots of punch-in recording fixes here!) but certainly adds a bit of "mood". The vocals are also on the dark and brooding side here, with Jimmy assuming yet another character role......this time, the mysterious narrator repeating the somewhat lacking in credibility line, "trust me........time will tell!" (would you buy a used soul from this fiend?). Part IV follows the now dead prisoner into the "other side": Eastern-tinged guitar & synth riffs lead the way here, while the narrator continues to plague the hangman's victim even after death (nice guy?!). Part IV then glides into a short reprise of Part III, in which the hangman berates the prisoner in the past tense now! After the climactic ending, the acoustic guitar/keyboards take up a short burst of the introductory theme and the narrator coldly announces that "..time has told".
