Welcome to Singled Out! where we ask artists to tell us the inside story of their latest single. Today August Burns Red's guitarist / primary songwriter / founding member JB Brubake tells us about The Seventh Trumpet," an older song that ABR re-imagined live, and that closes out their new live DVD/CD "Home" which comes out today. We now turn it over to JB for the story: This is the last track on our debut full length, Thrill Seeker, and also the last song of our set on our live record, Home. "The Seventh Trumpet" was our first attempt at writing a long closing track for an album. We wanted it to have an apocalyptic vibe, as the song lyrically focuses on the end of the world. The meat of the song is only about two and a half minutes, but the last section becomes a five minute+ outro that builds each measure with additional layers. It was a lot of fun to record and we actually had aspirations to do even more with it, like adding piano and acoustic guitar, but we ran out of time in the studio.
Over the last four years we've played this song at the end of our headlining sets more often than not. We seldom played it on support tours, as it was simply too long and took up too much of our limited set time. The first few times we tried to play this song live the same way it was recorded, but that was a tall task, as there were so many layers and parts going on that we couldn't play them all at the same time without a third guitar player. We played the song once in 2006 at a hometown show in Lancaster, PA with our first vocalist, Jon Hershey, taking on the responsibility of third guitar. It seemed like a lot of work for one song, so we never did that again. Instead, we changed the way we played the end of the song live. We shortened it by about two minutes and completely rewrote how the outro builds. Instead of building the outro with a bunch of layers that we couldn't pull off live, we restructured the end and added a spacey sounding guitar solo to fill things out. We also returned to the heavy breakdown rhythm that starts the outro to close out the track with a bang. It seemed to work well live and we've been doing it that way for years.
Now that we have a recording on Home of our live version of "The Seventh Trumpet," we discussed whether or not it's time to retire the track. We realize it's probably not a fan favorite anymore and we did kind of wear it out after playing it so many times over the years. Who knows though, maybe it just needs a little rest and we'll revisit it down the road sometime.
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album - right here!
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