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 blog can be found here: “Discovering Metal.”
As a young aspiring composer, I experimented with every genre I could, particularly film scores and rock music. However, after the sudden launch of my scoring career in 2003 with Battlestar Galactica, I focused on doggedly working to establish myself as a composer for film, television, and video games. Throughout the 2010s, however, my desire to produce a rock concept album crept up on me, as evidenced by this decade-old Facebook post.
I continued to focus on my scoring career for most of that decade, until I could no longer ignore my inner calling to explore rock and metal. Thus began The Singularity.
A NEW PATH
The summer of 2019 marked the first time I had two film scores in the box office top ten at the same time, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Child’s Play. I should have been on top of the world, yet my mental health declined. I no longer had time for my own artistic pursuits. Nearly a decade had passed since I’d put on a Queen tribute concert with my friends, or performed the music of Battlestar Galactica with my rock band, or thrashed on stage with former members of my favorite rock band, Oingo Boingo, or indeed written a single piece of music that was not designed to further my scoring career. I had lost my connection to the creative experiments with genre and narrative that first sparked my interest in music as a child. Had I wandered so far that I might not even have something artistic to say that was truly my own? I decided to write a collection of songs just for my own artistic expression to see what would happen.
To begin, I went back through my body of work from the previous twenty-five years: various demos, sketches, rejected scores, unused themes, a half-written musical, outline for an opera, symphonic works, student-film scores, and decades of songs written for various bands. Each was earnest, emotional, and written with an intense passion to communicate something personal.
The guitar-driven instrumental “Escape from the Machines” stood out. I was struck by how, a quarter century after I produced it on a 4-track cassette recorder, the song still radiated potential, even after nearly a dozen subsequent re-recordings. I wondered if now was the time to return to “Escape from the Machines,” in hopes of finding what had both captivated and eluded me for so many years.
The idea to produce a rock record, nagging at me my entire life, now burned bright and hot.
SKETCHING IN METAL
On September 24, 2019, I woke up at 6 a.m. and took a fresh cup of coffee out to my sound-proofed backyard studio, as I did every day. Rather than writing a cue for a film, series, or game, I instead began writing a song following my own creative passion. (This sketch would eventually materialize as “The Last of the Old Gods.”) As I worked, I suddenly felt nauseous—I thought I had food poisoning! I gradually realized this physical ailment was a manifestation of my own self-imposed guilt. Over the last decade, my focus on my career had been so absolute, my self-motivation to succeed so overwhelming, that my body induced a visceral reaction to the idea that I could invest time to write music for myself. Resolute, I powered through, and soon the sickness gave way to joyous creative exhilaration.
Inspired, I next rearranged “Escape from the Machines,” the first rock song I had ever written, and the first song for which I had recorded a live musician. This time, I imagined it with the blistering kick drums I heard in Gene Hoglan’s playing, and a more aggressive metal edge to the guitars. I retained my infamously difficult slap bass solo in the bridge, suspecting I could finally ask John Avila—the bassist who had originally inspired it—to play it. At last, to pay tribute to the first guitarist to ever play it, my high school friend Ryan Ho (who was now an award-winning record producer named Malay), I fittingly opened this new version of the song with a sample of Ryan’s original performance taken directly off my old Tascam 4-track cassette.
Energized, I leapt to other ideas, oddities from my vast catalogue of half-finished, rejected, or unused works. Every day, I experimented with combining hard rock with emotional, cinematic, symphonic colors. I uncovered seeds of old material that would eventually yield the mischievous pizzicato strings and hurdy gurdy grinds of “Industrial Revolution,” the pounding percussion of “Rage Child,” the operatic yearning of “Type III,” and several other songs that did not survive to the album’s final cut.
The most challenging song in my initial burst of creativity was the one that would become “The End of Tomorrow.” Inspired by a rejected demo, “The End of Tomorrow” was one of the biggest sparks that ignited The Singularity itself. Each time I worked on it, however, I was gripped by debilitating creative paralysis. In a panic, I even deleted it off the record until, unable to truly let it go, I broke through a reconceptualized take on it just days before recording began. (I am grateful the song survived as it eventually became one of our most enduring singles and provided uplifting melodic material that would later frame the entire album!)
In the fall of 2019, my goal was modest: to write a collection of songs that would be fun to perform live. I had no ambitions to write a concept album, and yet, the more I sketched, the more that narrative structures seemed to form. I felt the urge to infuse some songs with sonic characteristics that told a story. I began “Antikythera Mechanism” with a rhythmic backbone of mechanical sound effects from gears, engines, and clocks. “Industrial Revolution” was augmented by the relentless thump of machinery, trains, and steam engines, eventually inspiring its satirical indictment of contemporary workplace culture in the lyrics. The tragic steampunk love story in “The Automaton’s Heart” was inspired by the song’s foundation of musically tuned mechanical floppy disk drives.
These three sketches felt like they belonged together, as if chapters in a story. Other songs began to form miniature sets within the track list. “Rallying Cry” and “The Last of the Old Gods” became a duo of Nordic-inspired metal sung in Scandinavian languages. “Tatarigami,” “Exiles,” and “Midnight Sun” merged into a trio featuring bouncy rhythmic grooves in pounding folk percussion. The more I wrote, the stronger I felt a narrative pulsing beneath the surface, though it would take another year to solidify this suspicion and pursue creating a companion-piece graphic novel for my record.
I sketched ferociously for months, working twelve hours a day to produce over twenty instrumental demos with simple lyrical outlines. Most of what would become the music of The Singularity, though underdeveloped and incomplete, was crafted in a three-month whirlwind from September to December 2019. By the dawn of 2020 I had completed an eccentric playlist packed with anachronistic musical explorations. Brutal heavy metal guitar riffs and blistering double kick drum patterns interlaced with swirling symphonic strings, brass fanfares, scratchy Nordic folk strings, swinging Japanese taikos, blaring bagpipes, Javanese gamelan, mechanized floppy disk drives, wailing hurdy gurdies, and 8-bit chiptune synthesis. I felt like the end was in sight, but I knew the material possessed as-yet-unrealized dramatic potential. Was there a way to forge a story around the whole? As I sketched lyrics, I realized I needed the outside perspective from a creative partner for this material to truly live up to its potential.
FINDING THE WORDS
Though my brother, Brendan McCreary, and I grew up together, our musical backgrounds were strikingly different. Brendan taught himself rock and pop music with the same voracity with which I pursued film music. Our relationship evolved when he moved to Los Angeles to attend USC in what was my final year. Even in the pool of the USC music students, Brendan’s talent stood out—I was struck by how powerful Brendan’s voice had become when we rehearsed. I intuited there was much I could learn from him about songwriting, record production, and performing.
Brendan and I formed bands in various permutations, combining songs we had each written. (One such band, the short-lived Project 7, also featured my future wife and creative partner Raya Yarbrough, and played its only gig in the spring of 2002 at a coffeehouse in a USC dormitory, where I debuted yet another rendition of “Escape from the Machines” to a confused audience.) At the end of 2019, I was thrilled when Brendan agreed to write and co-write lyrics, sing lead vocals, and co-produce my album.
With Brendan involved, our songs evolved at an exponential rate. He tackled my sketches ruthlessly, a process that often crushed my ego. I trusted his instincts, wanting to ensure only the best ideas survived. Brendan and I instigated a rigorous “no filler” policy: if a song, or passage within a song, did not move the album’s flow forward with excitement, or could be removed and not missed, then it had to be deleted from the album, or its flaws identified and fixed. Literally every second of The Singularity underwent this scrutiny. (I am proud of how well the album flows as a result.) As we wrote, I tried every idea Brendan suggested, even if I disagreed, just to ensure we explored every possibility. As I revised my instrumental demos, he drafted lyrics and recorded temporary vocal lines.
When Brendan joined the project, my songs were in various states of lyrical completion. For some, I had completed most of the lyrics on my own, such as the steampunk story of “The Automaton’s Heart,” the celebratory and ceremonial “Midnight Sun,” and the mythologically inspired “The Last of the Old Gods.” Brendan’s true work began on the many songs for which I had a title and concept, but no lyrics whatsoever.
I had named most songs after concepts from astrophysics or science fiction. I named “Redshift” after the property of light as it shifts to red as it emits from a source moving away, such as a receding galaxy. I was inspired to write a song using this as a metaphor for social and emotional isolation. Brendan took my idea and made it resonate with powerful lines like “Empty mirrors, always farther, never nearer.”
For “Type III,” I imagined a story told from the perspective of a person who had journeyed to an advanced alien civilization, one capable of harnessing the power of an entire galaxy—the third type on the famous Kardashev scale (hence the song’s title). Filled with technology we could only comprehend as magic, such a place would seem like heaven and yet the singer has been forced to return home. Brendan captured the character’s intense longing with lines like “To feel what I feel, everything, the joy and the rage, it terrifies me so completely, I’ll never be the same.”
“Roko’s Basilisk” is named after the true-life viral meme in which people genuinely feared that we are all living in a simulation overseen by an evil artificial intelligence who would punish anyone who even thought against it. (If that sounds outrageous to you, dear reader, then I have terrible news: according to the theory, you are already damned to an eternity of digital torment just by reading this blog. My sincere apologies!) Brendan cleverly used this far-fetched concept as a metaphor for our society ignoring the perils of climate change.
Together, we crafted a chorus in which Jens Kidman’s full-throated growl screams directly at the listener, “You, yes you, pick and choose what you believe!” The song’s bridge offers a hypnotically repeating “Too late” that forms a prophetic mantra. Together with the ominous monologue of “Red Eyes” and the furious “Last Stop,” these three songs eventually formed the dark heart at the center of the album.
I was initially inspired to write “Event at the Horizon” by an article I read about the horrific PTSD suffered by military drone operators engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Brendan crafted a sinisterly satirical lyric that includes one of my favorite lines on the album: “Dropping bombs from the office, the American Dream!”
The title “Syzygy” comes from an astronomical term describing when planetary bodies align, such as an eclipse, but Brendan and I evolved the concept into a narcissist’s anthem, sung by a swaggeringly selfish character who expects everything in life to line up without him having to do anything to help others. Oozing with venomous sarcasm, Brendan wrote for “Syzygy” a contender for my favorite line on the entire album: “And in the morning when I rise, throw out every fork and every spoon—just knives.”
Brendan’s lyrical genius is that he was able to draw inspiration from my science and science fiction trappings and still craft songs that feel relatable. He boiled my often-outlandish ideas down to their core truths, writing lyrics that simultaneously evoke epic narrative and simple, grounded emotional concepts.
For the bombastic, oddly metered 7/4 thrash metal song “Last Stop,” Brendan channeled crushing experiences from his personal life into enigmatic lyrics rife with bitter contempt. The fierce sarcasm in these lines perfectly complimented the complexity and ferocity of the guitars and drums: “You’re the hero, gallantly died upon the martyr’s tree, and I’m the one who took it all from you.”
Lyrical structures began to form that tied the album together conceptually. The words to “Incinerator” simmer with images of heat and destruction. Lines like “burn down my garden,” and “dying on the vine” reflect the chorus’s devastating suggestions of “Smoke and ash, from the flames.” The song implies a phoenix-like rebirth, which comes to fruition not at the end of the song, but an hour and forty minutes later, at the end of the album.
For “The End of Tomorrow,” Brendan crafted words that gave symmetry to the album’s entire experience, with the bittersweet lyrics “From the ashes of the garden, what grows anew won’t be the same.”
Most of the lyrics were written in a marathon of just a few months from the end of 2019 into 2020. Final lyrical polishes and lead vocal recording would stretch on for years. I relied on Brendan’s unique lyrical and vocal abilities to elevate each song. One by one, I replaced my instrumental demos with mixes that included Brendan’s scratch vocal takes. I could hardly contain my exhilaration as a playlist of instrumental demos began to take shape as a rock album!
The next step was to fulfill my vision of a truly collaborative experience and see if any other guest artists would be willing to be a part of The Singularity.
—Bear
