A Vessel

Welcome back, Mr. Hyde!!! (insert creepy evil laugh)

I ended my last blog about my lo-fi/chillout side project Faded Grey with this statement: “Mr. Hyde is on a short vacation; let’s welcome Dr. Jekyll for the time being.”

Well it turns out that Mr. Hyde is now back to inflict darkness, riffs, and metal unto the world. (Side note: Forgive my overbearing references to “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” but I just started reading the novel today and I’ve fallen absolutely in love with it.)

Ahh!! I miss the sound of distorted guitars, wailing guitar leads, pounding drums, growls, and screams. I miss recording heavy music, and I’m so glad that Greyfade is back! It never really went away, as I’m always playing guitar and creating noise, but I missed writing and completing finished songs for Greyfade.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love what I did with Faded Grey because it provided an outlet for my improvisational guitar playing and, overall, the simplicity of creating music. I didn’t need to overthink things—I just had to play whatever came to mind in the moment. I won’t stop Faded Grey, and I’ll keep on playing that type of music until I stop enjoying it—and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

After recording Faded Grey, a sense of urgency and restlessness took over me, and I started immediately writing heavy songs—the result of which are four of what I think are my darkest and heaviest songs to date. To add fuel to the fire, a lot has happened in the world since then—a tragic war in the region where I live, continuous disregard for human life, corruption, etc. How can you not be influenced to write dark and heavy songs?

While writing the songs, I didn’t want “commercial”; I didn’t want “catchiness.” I didn’t care about how long the songs would be. I didn’t care whether or not there would be a hook in the song. I didn’t care if there would be too many riffs in a song. None of this mattered - “The weirder, the better” was my motto.

The four songs turned out so different yet so intertwined with each other.

“When the Law Betrays” is probably my heaviest and riffiest track to date. It’s an in-your-face song which, as the title suggests, talks about corruption at the highest level.

“My Shiva” is a sick and twisted love song about a person who falls for an enchantress, who then sucks the life out of him. But in the end, that person cannot live without his tormentor—talk about Stockholm Syndrome, right? Musically, the song is a riff extravaganza. It has so many twists and turns that it would require more than just a few listens.

“A Dusty Lonely Toy” has probably one of my favorite lyrics that I recently wrote. It’s a story about how people on one side of the world try to sympathize and feel sorry for the people in war-stricken countries, yet soon after, they go on with their daily lives, enjoy time with their families, and celebrate Christmas (by the way, the lyrics were written around Christmas time last year), while on the other side of the world, people are dying due to wars, and “a dusty, lonely toy” is lying next to a dead child. Musically, the song is also very rich and dense. It has the slow, the melancholic, growls, the heaviness, and an eerily catchy chorus.

Last but certainly not least, we have the song “I am…,” which is a favorite of mine. It’s the weirdest song that I have written to date. It’s a spoken word song with a repetitive and hypnotic guitar line that was recorded using a classical guitar, with droney dystopian effects in the background. The song slowly builds up until it reaches a chaotic climax, and then shifts back to the hypnotic, repetitive guitar, with a spoken word outro to wrap things up.


I remember I was pampering myself with a glass (well, maybe more) of wine and, out of the blue, I felt a sense of urgency to pick up a pen and paper to write something. I started with the words “I am” and in less than ten minutes, the song was done. It’s a song that can be interpreted in many ways, and I leave this openness to the listener to make out of it what they please. But to me, it’s about the light and darkness in each one of us. Ahh, there is that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde reference again!

I’m very proud of this collective body of work. It has everything you’ve become accustomed to from Greyfade, plus way more. In hindsight, I think I wanted to prove to myself that I can still play heavy music. I hope I’ve done a good job.