Behind The Tracks: Knim - A Prisoner On The Seas (Single) (2022)

Dennis offered one day a couple years back (we were in a prior band together) to meet up for a jam-shout out to Rock and Roll Circus rehearsal studio in Leeds. We were interested in writing a bit of music again together so we started to come up with some material. Lockdown happened but we kept collaborating over the interweb. Fortunately, we both had the capacity to record at home so we sent stuff back and forth to each other. As it turned out we liked writing this way as we were able to write complex parts without the limited rehearsal time pushing us. Collaborating remotely we could take our sweet time writing the best parts we could come up with (including some we couldn’t play at first). Time went on and we built upon a collection of material. Some of which turned into the track The Prisoner On The Seas. Happy that this seemed to be going somewhere we went on to look out for a vocalist. In September 2021 Andy joined the band. Up till this point, no lyrics had been written for any of the tracks. We made a few adjustments to Prisoner to accommodate the vocals but nothing major. Mainly changing lengths of sections. Andy was able to weave his magic into the track without disturbing the feel that we had built up despite when we were writing we didn’t really have vocals in mind. We wanted to have a solid song instrument-wise that could stand on its own should we wish. I think this shows in the complexity and non-standard structure - we were free instrumentally to do what we wanted.

The Prisoner On The Seas began with drums and guitar as you would imagine. As we progressed we tried (I say we it was Dennis mainly) to experiment with adding some synth as an extra layer not found in what we had written together in the past. We weren’t looking to give this a prominent role in the track but using it to embellish it and present another source of inspiration.

Behind the lyrics:

Andy was left in charge of the lyrics and Prisoner was the first song we sent over to him to work on. We didn’t have any set ideas for lyrical themes. Andy is an avid sword and sorcery reader and at the time was reading a lot of Weird Tales pulp magazines. Prisoner was therefore inspired by a section from one of these short stories about a barbarian being seduced and lured aboard a ship, with some of his own life experience sprinkled in to add a bit of authenticity. Andy’s end goal is to write fantasy influenced lyrics rooted in reality.