The Widetrack Chronicles 74: Connivance

The Widetrack Chronicles 74: Connivance

Connivance was the first new song we wrote together after finishing The Unwakening...

It continued the game-changing point that came during the making of the album, when Zach took the reins as primary guitar/bass composer - which is to say, his playing and writing had surpassed mine by such a wide margin that it just made more sense to let him have the lion’s share of that responsibility...

Going back to when Zach first joined Widetrack, it was to play bass on our third album, Widetrack III, which had already been written, and mostly recorded...

Immediately upon its release, he and I began writing our first songs together... The initial ones - Voyeurs, Requiem, Gone Dark, Drones - still had me writing guitar parts...

But that all changed once Zach’s skills as a guitarist surpassed mine; and it happened surprisingly fast...

Soon thereafter came the songs Martyr and Tribal, in which he wrote guitar and bass to some drum grooves I’d recorded... It was immediately apparent that this was going to be our new direction of putting songs together...

But nothing could have prepared me for the musical growth spurt he underwent that resulted in the final few tracks we came up with for The Unwakening...

Terra, The Rift, Unveiled, The Chosen and Cursed took things to an entirely new level... I could see something quite special was happening before my very eyes... It was when I knew that he was going to be the main composer of guitar/bass parts for the foreseeable future...

And so this brings us to Connivance...

Now, I’d be lying if I said that coming up with songs after our experience with The Unwakening would be easy…

As I’ve said before, the experience of writing one song per month in 2019 proved to be a double-edged sword of sorts for Zach…

This was his first foray into the world of professional music, and by the end of that crash course in writing/recording/mixing a song a month, he was pretty much toast…

I can’t say I blame him… We certainly learned that this isn’t how we want to do things… For better or for worse, in 2020, even though people are releasing music on a much more frequent basis, we‘ve learned that our most effective method of creating music is to allow songs more time to evolve into what they can ultimately be…

The downside of that is, obviously, we may possibly be releasing music less frequently than other artists…

But the upside is that we (and you) will know that our songs are every bit as good as we can make them, and that ample time has been given to each one to allow for optimal development…

Now, I’m not saying we‘re going to approach our music with the same insane indulgence of time allotment as a band like, say, TOOL, for instance... but if there’s one thing we’ve learned it's that there are few things more depressing than listening back to a song and thinking, “God, I wish I would‘ve taken just a bit more time for my ideas to develop on that one…“

Yeah, we’re not going to let that happen again if we can help it…

That said, there is a instinct artists develop over the years for knowing when a song is as complete as it can be, given the resources one might have to invest in its creation…