Dreadnought is the 10th album in the A Year of Music Duodecalogy (yes, I had to look that up and now you do, too). It’s also the album I had to keep fixing the art for because I kept misspelling the title. As with previous albums in the series, it is a mix of different types of music. And like the last two albums, it has a track that stands out as horrific. We’ll get to that one last.
As this was nearing the end of the series, I was working late nights of overtime to get it completed. On the song Rock the Beat, my final line has the word “mandolin.” You may notice this weird hiccup that sounds like an editing mistake. It’s not. It’s my voice being weird because I was having to use it so much to make all these damn songs.
Like Rock the Beat, the song Skull Bomb uses a hook that consists of a repeated or chopped verse from the song itself. Why? Because I was so exhausted. I moved that year to a large property which we maintain, plus the world was falling apart. My wife had gone back to school and also caught COVID, which at that time was not the brief cold it is today. I wasn’t really in the mod to write up custom hooks.
Still, the chopped hooks seemed to work.
Years ago I wrote a song called Name Dropping. The song references a large list of women, primarily models, scene girls, and porn stars. The idea for the song was to drop the “hottest” track ever made.
That track is still one of my favorites, and has some of my most notable lyrics. My favorite is probably this one:
What ever happened to spitting rhymes with skill behind the art?
now it’s all about the cash and I’m stacked as Calista Flockhart
While writing Torrent, which would eventually be named Malevolent Flow III, the idea popped in my head to do something similar to Name Dropping. However, I didn’t want to just rehash the same idea and list a new bunch of random hot Internet women and porn stars.
Since the song is more of an “attack the mic with a hammer and murder its face” kind of song, I instead went a different way. The lyrics that comprise the “name dropping” section all reference women who have been some of my favorites in action and horror films.
I May pull this apart like Angela Bettis
Just to do it better beheaded I’m headed toward obvious evidence
That Mic is going Haywire like Gina Corano
I’m stronger than those foes who rose to throw down when I flow to show
I’m not to be underestimated I’m armed with serrated
Weapons attacking to battle hard like Rose Salazar
An alien to rappers I will make you all believers
When I blast you bitches into space like I’m Sigourney Weaver
I should never be crossed, I am off
Leave you lost,
when I pause time and kick you in the head like Carrie Anne Moss
…You’ll take a damn loss I am coming mean
Mutated rage filled like Dafney Keen I’m keen to make you bleed
Leave the static I won’t have it but I have a habit
Built on practice of unlocking badass mode like I’m Noomi Rapace
This’ll be a classic in the end proving once again
That I’m the wrong name to Hunt bitch like Betty Gilpin
I think I mispronounced Noomi Rapace’s name, at least according to a pronunciation I heard recently. to get it right the first time, I had to hear someone else say it. Perhaps they were wrong also. No idea.
If I had to make a top 10 tracks from A Year of Music, Ocean is going to be among them. The track is a reflection of how I was feeling toward the end of 2020, and has been a strong competitor for one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever made. It has many lines that I love, but this one stands out for me:
Compared to me, you don’t, even I’m no match for myself
When I look in the mirror, I see somebody else
That line became part of the inspiration behind the song Mirror on You Have a Future. I love the music for the track, and continue to listen to it often.
Mike is the type of guy who should not exist. And his song, When Things Go Dark, is the kind of thing many can’t listen to all the way through. That’s understandable. But you need to get to the end.
The song tells the story of a 19-year-old good looking, well built misogynistic abusive pedophilic user. He’s a highly twisted individual that I’ve hated for a long time.
What?
Mike is a character from my early days of novel and novella writing. He became the catchall for everything horrible and embodied the very worst behavior of any character in any story I had written. He treats women like objects, screws them at any age, and even rapes them violently when they defy him. While writing this track wasn’t easy, recording it was even harder. I had to actually tell his story verbally, which bothered me a lot.
Mike is a disgusting sociopath, and his story is graphic and hard to listen to. But if you do, you may appreciate the end. Just make sure you’ve already listened to Everything Is Fine. It’s sort of a requirement for this to make sense.