In this series of blogs, I chronicle my path bringing The Singularity to life as a rock album, graphic novel, and concert experience. My previous blogs can be found here: “Discovering Metal” and “Writing the Record.”
I began writing what would become The Singularity in the Summer of 2019, and by the end of that year I had completed a functioning demo of more than two dozen songs. Then my brother, Brendan McCreary, joined the project as a co-producer, lyricist, and lead singer and we worked to convert my instrumental demos into fully fledged songs. The idea occurred to me that I would expand the record’s vocal colors by working with a variety of different singers, artists whose particular gifts could match and enhance the music’s wide emotional range. I felt the momentum on the project picking up, and it seemed like the album would be finished in a flash!
However, in the first week of March, 2020, my family and I, along with nearly everyone in the world, hunkered down into isolated lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Malaise and panic gripped the music community when the entire global apparatus for recording and touring, the primary source of income for many, ground to a halt. My dream of finishing the album quickly and performing it live that year evaporated, yet I was undeterred.
SYSTEM OF A SOUND
Of all my friends at that time, none knew more about metal than Serj Tankian. Most famous as the lead singer of legendary metal band System of a Down, Serj is also an accomplished solo artist, composer, poet, artist, and political activist. We became good friends throughout the 2010s, having met because of our shared Armenian ancestry and musical inclinations, and we had also collaborated together on Godzilla: King of the Monsters. I trusted his opinion, especially when it comes to rock and metal, and knew that he would give me brutally honest feedback. If my songs weren’t any good, I knew he’d just say so. I called him, saying my brother and I were working on a metal record with guest artists, and before the rest of the sentence could leave my lips, Serj enthusiastically offered to sing one of our songs.
To my surprise, Serj picked the one song that Brendan and I had written with his specific voice in mind: the bombastic fanfare, “Incinerator.” At the end of March 2020, as lockdown began, Serj and his family were staying at their rural property in New Zealand. While he was in this truly isolated place, Serj and I collaborated remotely while he recorded himself.
Once I heard Serj’s vocals, I knew immediately that “Incinerator” would be the first song on the album, acting as a warning that a massive, aggressive, and emotional journey lay ahead. The Singularity, a project that began as a means for me to find my own creative voice, was expanding into one that could soar with contributions from multiple voices.
METAL MONSTERS
When I first began sketching The Singularity, I made a list of all the singers I knew personally, artists I wanted to ask about collaborating. Then, I made a second list of singers I did not know but dreamed of working with. At the top of that list: Slipknot’s energetic frontman, Corey Taylor.
Corey is one of my favorite singers in modern rock, because he is capable of effortlessly shifting from devastating growls to soaring melodies. After making a connection through our mutual friend Scott Ian of Anthrax, I was exhilarated when Corey agreed to sing “Leviathan.”
One of my favorite moments of the entire album creation process was when Corey recorded his vocals in Las Vegas, while I was at home writing cues for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. My phone pinged and I saw a selfie from Corey, in front of the mic as he laid down his first takes. I immediately sent one back, then I struggled to focus on my writing, knowing that one of my favorite rock singers was, at that very moment, recording a song my brother and I had written while imagining his voice!
A few hours later, I was driving home from a recording session when I got a text from Corey saying he had finished the backing vocals and that his engineer was emailing over a reference mix. I pulled the car over to the curb near a busy intersection at rush hour and blasted the mix through my speakers. Anyone passing by witnessed me cheering and throwing my hands in horns over my steering wheel. Corey brought the full range of his amazing vocal abilities to our song, without losing his distinct swagger. His laughter at the end of the final chorus concludes one of the album’s most badass anthems with a playful, humorous wink. His vocal was everything I’d hoped for—and more! Fulfilling one of my earliest dreams when I began work on The Singularity.
I was fortunate to discover another powerful metal singer when I met Esjay Jones. We met through one of my brother’s mutual friends, when he and I were looking for a female singer with strong rock and metal chops to sing our original end title song for the series The Serpent Queen. After breaking onto the rock scene in her native South Africa, Esjay had since moved to Los Angeles and focused on a successful career as a record producer. Brendan and I were blown away by her voice—she shreds. We were equally impressed by her collaborative attitude, and when The Serpent Queen was finished, we asked her if she would join us for The Singularity.
I was thrilled she agreed to sing “Event at the Horizon.” She brought the scathingly cynical bloodlust the sardonic lyrics required, utilizing all her vocal power, ranging from rapid fire bloodcurdling screams to beautifully layered harmonies.
GODDESSES
One of my favorite vocalists to collaborate with is Eivør Pálsdóttir, herself a celebrated singer-songwriter, who joined me on my God of War scores. She lives in the remote Faroe Islands, so we had collaborated together frequently from afar. However, her tour in 2019 brought her to Los Angeles with a free afternoon, so I was thrilled to work with her in person at long last. With her shocking blonde hair, and a hide frame drum tucked under arm, she strolled into my studio at Sparks & Shadows looking herself like a Viking warrior of old. I brought an accordion and hurdy gurdy and messed around with riffs while she sang melodies, played her drum, and grunted in her unforgettable beat-box-like vocal percussion.
Together, we discovered a groove we liked, but I threw a wrench in the gears, and challenged her to convert the pattern from a familiar 4/4 to an odd 5/4 meter. We stumbled around the new rhythm for a while until we found a pattern that felt natural in five. She improvised a beautiful vocal melody while I tinkered with instrumental riffs. After a couple hours, Eivør and I had laid down the basic tracks for a song that felt like it really had a soul. I took our tracks back to my home studio and shaped them into a song form, as Eivør returned home and wrote lyrics in her native Faroese. Our muscular anthem “Rallying Cry” was born.
I named a sketch “Antikythera Mechanism” after the real-life ancient Greek artifact, the world’s oldest surviving analog computer, a true marvel of human engineering that sat lost at the bottom of the Aegean Sea for over two thousand years. I was excited to collaborate on this song with my wife, the brilliant poet, writer, singer and songwriter Raya Yarbrough. Raya and I have been collaborating in music and life for over twenty years, having first met in college and played in various bands together.
She brought to “Antikythera Mechanism” not only her haunting voice but also her lyrical gifts in crafting the brilliant text, written from the perspective of the device itself. “Antikythera Mechanism” opens with “You’ve come for the answer,” and offers some of the album’s most elegiac thoughts: “Awash in the centuries, anointed in salt and decay, watched comets through fathoms like an astrolabe alone in the sway.”
When we recorded Raya’s vocals in my studio, our five-year-old daughter Sonatine watched from the couch next to the speakers. At the end of the session, Sonatine wanted to sing, so we brought her up to the microphone to double the song’s climactic choir lines. She is audible on the final recording, tucked into the ethereal choir that concludes the enigmatic song.
RECORDING RAPPERS
I met Raheem Jarbo, aka celebrated nerdcore rapper Mega Ran, at Comic Con in the late 2000s, when CAPCOM dumped us in an interview together because they were running behind. That scheduling snafu resulted in the two of us becoming good friends. I knew I wanted him to be a part of The Singularity. Together, we co-wrote “First Day Out,” an experiment in combining hip-hop, heavy metal, grunge, and soaring symphonic music.
Written at the height of the pandemic, “First Day Out” was inspired by our universal circumstances at that time. After sharing pent-up angst in lines like “Screaming but it sounds like I’m whispering,” the song gifts the listener with a joyous release with its exuberant chorus: “Can’t wait ’til they open up the gates, can’t wait ’til they see my face.” In the album order, “First Day Out” offers a cathartic escape from a trio of the bleakest and most intense songs.
Scottish Gaelic rap is not something one hears every day. However, I had heard my friend and frequent musical partner on Outlander, Griogair Labhruidh, rap in Scottish Gaelic on several recordings, and always wanted to collaborate with him in this style. The Singularity liberated me from creative restrictions and offered new opportunities to explore new genre mash-ups. If Scottish-Gaelic-rap-symphonic-hip-hop-metal had any chance to thrive, this was the moment!
In early 2020, Griogair frequently posted about how certain dialects of Scottish Gaelic were becoming extinct as elders in remote communities passed away. I felt pangs of sadness reading his words, and suggested to him that we write a song together on the topic. While he was isolated on a remote Scottish island, and I was in lockdown in Los Angeles, we began a close collaboration of frequent video calls, file transfers, and discussions of Scottish culture and music. We fearlessly strove to combine hip-hop, metal, traditional Scottish folk music, and orchestral strings into one of the album’s most bizarre yet infectiously catchy songs, “Exiles.” The song contains some of the album’s most personal lyrics: “Written out of history, Scotland’s sons, the forgotten ones, it’s no mystery, they taught us none of these truths about this land and how I’m speaking a language that the people don’t understand.”
We finished basic tracking of “Exiles” in 2020, and two years later, I found an opportunity to bring another legendary Scottish voice to the album: Billy Boyd, the renowned musician, actor, and singer, best known for his performance as Pippin in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Billy and I communicated after he guested on my series Outlander and became close friends after the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, spending many dinners nerding out together about Tolkien and the joys and challenges of life in the arts. Billy and I went into the studio in the fall of 2022 and recorded backing vocals together to support Griogair’s powerful vocal performance on “Exiles.” Griogair joined us remotely from Scotland and coached us on how to properly pronounce the Scottish Gaelic.
My fondest memory of that afternoon was when we asked Billy to provide some shouting, hooting, and hollering, to give the feeling the song was being performed by a raucous live band. (In Scottish music, this celebratory vocalization is often called “hooching,” though the English spelling varies.) I should not have been surprised, considering his experience as an actor, when Billy immediately dove into these gestures with reckless, joyous energy. Now complete with new backing vocals and Billy’s infectiously upbeat shouts, “Exiles” bristled with authentic Scottish cultural energy. Collaborating with these two delightful, thickly accented singers I admire deeply, I felt a newfound connection to my own Scottish roots.
LOOPS AND LAYERS
I met my friend Morgan Sorne when I saw him perform in the living room at a dinner party hosted by Richard Elfman (celebrated cult filmmaker and film composer Danny’s brother). Standing before a phalanx of keyboard stands strapped together with samplers, microphones, drum machines, and effects processors, Morgan reminded me of a mad scientist! Before our eyes, he captured and manipulated his voice in real time to create hypnotic vocal textures. I was completely blown away by his technical prowess and authenticity as a performer. I stopped Morgan as he carried his gear back to his van and got his number. We quickly became good friends. Together, we co-wrote the hypnotic “Tears for the Dead Life.”
Morgan and I recorded dozens of vocal loops and layers that I then worked into a dense arrangement that also included orchestral strings and gentle acoustic guitars. The result was a moody, emotional meditation that was a clear departure from the rest of the album’s bombast. Many of the song’s most shocking musical colors, including the iconic blasting bass line of the song’s chorus, all originate from Morgan’s voice. Morgan then penned and sang poetic lyrics, lamenting loss while looking to the future: “Tears for the dead life, heart cry for the new day, as the old falls down and the new rises up.” His opening lyric, “It’s the end of an era, it’s the end of an old age,” would go on to influence the writing of the graphic novel adaptation’s heart-wrenching climax.
OZOMATLI ORIGINS
When I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, I went to a number of Ozomatli shows and became a massive fan, wearing their shirt until it finally fell apart. I was impressed by how they melded musical genres such as hip-hop, Latin music, and world music. I was struck by lead singer/trumpet player Asdru Sierra. Raised by Mexican migrants in East Los Angeles, he had experimented with many vocal styles, including learning Tuvan throat singing—the technique of singing two notes at the same time—from masters in Mongolia. Asdru’s voice resonated in every musical genre the band explored. In the summer of 2020, I sought him out to discuss the possibility of singing on my new album.
Asdru and I hit it off, and I was excited to learn that he’s also a hilarious, honest, chill dude. He told me that he had always loved metal music as a kid, but that his conservative mother had forbidden him to listen to it, because of the Satanic panic of the 1980s. Now might be the time to rectify this! I asked him if he would sing on my metal record. He replied “Sure, I’d love to record with you again.” I was confused. “Again?” What did he mean by “again”? Asdru told me he had already provided Tuvan throat singing on my score for “Pooka!,” an episode of Blumhouse’s anthology series Into the Dark. I was unable to attend that session because I was traveling and had no idea that the vocalist was none other than the lead singer from one of my favorite bands! (No wonder the vocals on that score sounded so great.)
Asdru recorded scratch vocal tracks in the fall of 2020 for the sinister “Industrial Revolution.” In the spring of 2021, I sat in my car in a parking garage outside a downtown medical facility, having just received my first shot of the COVID vaccine. I had tears running down my face when I realized I could once again get together with people in shared physical spaces. I started calling and texting everybody I wanted to hang out with, imagining all the fun musical opportunities that awaited now that this miracle of modern science had made it safer. The first phone call I made was to Asdru, and I asked him if he’d rerecord “Industrial Revolution” with me in the studio. “It’s time,” I said. “Let’s do this!”
In June of 2021, I stepped into one of my favorite studios on the west side of Los Angeles and met Asdru in person for the first time. Watching Asdru through the double-paned studio glass, I felt a wave of relief to be in that communal space, no longer watching musicians from a computer screen. I suspect Asdru felt that same energy as well, because his vocal takes now bristled with that familiar energy I recognized from seeing Ozomatli live in raucous concerts. After the primary takes were finished, I went into the main room, gave him a big hug, and then asked him if he would once again add his Mongolian Tuvan throat-singing skills to my music. Asdru sang a haunting multiphonic note for the climactic conclusion of “Industrial Revolution.”
NORTHEN EUROPEAN VOICES
While in Iceland recording God of War in 2017, I spent many afternoons wandering Reykjavík listening to local metal bands. None impressed me more than a band called HAM, with their massive sound held down by the booming, operatic baritone of Sigurjón Kjartansson. I was inspired to write a symphonic aria for his voice, “The Last of the Old Gods.” I wrote the lyrics as if they were a passage from an opera, told from the perspective of an ancient god lamenting he is no longer feared by the modern world as he fades into obscurity. After making a connection to Sigurjón through a mutual friend, he not only brought his booming sound to my album but also translated my lyrics into his native Icelandic.
Monitoring the recording session in Iceland from my studio in Los Angeles thousands of miles away, I felt chills down my spine. Sigurjón and I originally discussed recording an alternate in English, but after we finished the Icelandic takes, we scrapped the idea and never recorded a word of it in English. We both felt the lyrics’ emotional intent was communicated better in Icelandic. Together with Eivør’s Faroese lyrics in “Rallying Cry” and Griogair’s Scottish Gaelic verses in “Exiles,” these are the only songs on The Singularity to be sung in languages other than English. In all three cases, their emotional narrative comes across more purely in the singer’s native languages. Most listeners don’t know concretely what the singer is saying, but the power of their voices makes absolutely clear what they are feeling.
I collaborated with another icon of northern European metal: Jens Kidman, lead singer of the extreme metal band Meshuggah. I have loved Meshuggah’s sound—technically precise, and yet guttural and emotional—from the moment I first heard them. Channeling that intensity, I wrote “Roko’s Basilisk” to showcase the metal genre’s signature growls and screams, daydreaming that maybe one day I could convince a singer like Jens to perform it. Behold, Jens and I connected through our mutual friend, drummer Gene Hoglan, and I was honored Jens joined this project.
Jens brought to “Roko’s Basilisk” a style of screaming and singing with a surprisingly dynamic range of emotional nuance. He screams the way a virtuoso violinist plays. Jens’s first verse crescendo from restrained whisper to full-throated roar is terrifying and made even more strange by the harmonic clash from haunting Balinese gamelan undertones. It remains one of my favorite moments on the record. Beyond our musical collaboration, Jens and I became quite friendly over the years chatting at length about life and music. (His horrifying roar inspired me to feature Jens on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season Two, singing “The Last Ballad of Damrod,” a song about a vicious hill-troll on a murderous rampage.)
OPERATIC TENOR
For more than two decades, I have adored how Rufus Wainwright’s sonorous voice floats above brilliant arrangements with artful lyrics. I was fortunate to see him perform an intimate concert at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, where I introduced myself. We became good friends, and Raya and I wound up spending evenings at his house with his delightful husband, Jörn, enjoying home-cooked meals while our daughters played upstairs.
However, I never thought I’d hear Rufus Wainwright’s operatic tone soar above a bombastic heavy metal track. (I doubt any of his fans ever imagined this either!) However, when I played him the demo of “Type III,” Rufus recognized an evocative melody and tragic sadness in the lyrics that he could effectively convey. To my absolute delight, he agreed to sing it. He brought heartfelt longing to the chorus lyrics “Can’t turn away from you.” This was an entirely new genre for Rufus, and I am grateful he took a chance on me. (Inspired by our delightful collaboration, I called on his talents once again in 2024 for “Old Tom Bombadil,” a gentle folk tune featured in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season two.)
McCREARY BROTHERS
Reveling in the contributions of these many talented vocalists, I also brought my own voice to the record, adding many layers of backing vocals. For both “Midnight Sun” and “The End of Tomorrow” I took this concept to an extreme degree. I sang over seventy-five layers of backing vocals to create the impression of a massive stadium of singers on the choruses. I slightly altered the quality of my voice on each take, ranging from my lowest chest voice, to my highest falsetto, to breathy whispers. This process took an entire day—per song—to sing, edit, and mix these layers. By each evening I could barely speak, but as I listened to the mixes, I smiled: all well worth it.
As each new incredible guest singer joined the project, Brendan continued to refine his lead vocal takes on other songs, upgrading from scratch vocal sketches to truly remarkable performances that held their own against a tidal wave of vocal talent. On several songs, he blended with our guest singers to create unique vocal colors. Brendan innovated the clustered backing vocals to frame Rufus on the choruses of “Type III.” After supporting Serj Tankian with stacks of grinding backing vocals on “Incinerator,” Brendan stepped to the forefront to scream the song’s climactic statements of “Incinerate!”
Despite the eclectic roster of guest vocalists, Brendan’s powerhouse lead vocals held the album together. He oscillated between roars and angelic lines on “Tatarigami,” and brought a distinct swagger to “Red Shift,” “Rage Child,” and “Syzygy.” He holds our attention as a storyteller in “The Automaton’s Heart” and “Midnight Sun,” and brings even more anger to “Last Stop” than the drop-tuned guitars. However, his heart-wrenching performance on “The End of Tomorrow” affects me most—emotional, expressive, with a dangerous rock edge.
As each new voice brought distinct personalities and life experiences to my music, I felt a giddy creative thrill hearing their unique interpretations. This vast array of voices resulted in being one of the most significant components of The Singularity.
—Bear
