This song ultimately took on a life of its own. Around the time I started writing for the album, I'd been watching Ken Burns' national parks documentary and learned that Yosemite roughly translated to "they are killers." I decided to take that and run with it for a concept album, although I never wrote any lyrics and thus had to tell my story through song titles and musical feeling. When it came time to record though, all I had was riffs for 12 songs with no order and nothing more concrete about my story line than an assassin being hunted, brought to justice and executed, and temporarily escaping from the afterlife before his final punishment. I just picked an order to record the then-untitled songs, named them based on where they happened in the story, and mostly left them the way they were. What became "Gallows" was originally just the echoey guitar and the main riff. I'd wanted a mean synth underneath the echoes, but when I started thinking about the story in terms of the execution the synth bass morphed into a separate intro. The bridge with a mellotron choir came about thinking about the priest giving last rites and the assassin struggling to escape. Finally, I ended up adding the rainstorm to lend more mood to the intro and outro, and came up with the idea of having the storm come to a head and introduce the heavier riffs with a big thunderclap.