Pareidolia - the illusory perception of meaningful patterns or images of familiar things in random or amorphous data

This title came to be because of the riff at the beginning of the song that comes back in “disguise” in a more melodic format at the end. It’s a familiar pattern and a deliberately meant to trigger repetition.. kind of an “I see what you did there” type of moment in the track.

My two main influences for this track were Northlane and earlier Spiritbox stuff (they had just formed at the time I wrote this.) But beyond that, I wanted this song to be dominated by lead guitar work that challenged me, and that’s what I did.

I tapped my good friend James Knoerl on the shoulder to live track drums for this one. Drums were going to make this song stand out, and I wanted a professional, not just me sitting behind my desk for hours dragging and dropping MIDI notes.

If you aren’t familiar, James is one of the masterminds behind the band Aviations. They’re a 6 piece progressive metal band consisting of some of the most brilliant musicians I know. I was lucky enough to meet these guys way back in 2011 while I was in my first band, Water’s Edge (way more on that later).

They invited us to play on a few of their shows and we had a blast. Most notably, we played the notorious Middle East venue in Boston, Massachusetts and a super random Knights of Columbus in North Providence, RI. As you could expect, the vibes were completely different. The North Providence show was on Halloween, and I vividly remember James in a banana suit behind the kit and Sam ripping up these insane guitar parts in a full on Spiderman costume, gloves and all.

The drum part at 1:02 will have you ready to run through a wall, and what follows that is pure magic.

Check out this conversation between James and I below where we talk about so many topics such as creative philosophy, approach to writing, and just some general shooting of the shit between friends.