Track By Tracks: El Supremo - Signor Morte Improvvisa (2024)

Breadwinner opens the album with a riff that references previous jams of ours but with a different kind of urgency and heaviness. Familiar territory for the band, playing to our strengths. The kind of jam that comes naturally. Chad and I have pretty much always been able to walk into a room, not even say a word, and just make music. Chris' addition of thick synth sounds balanced out the fuzzy guitar and the trade-offs between guitar and synth solos fell into place, informing each other without getting in each other's way.

The dynamic breakdown in the middle of the song seemed like a necessary breath from the loud beginning. This sort of "space jam" is a hallmark of our longer tracks and makes room for some improvisation and exploration. The volume ramps up and back down and up again. The guitar solo that kicks in around 7:30 is the sound of a man at the end of his rope, searching for the right sound, frustrated with himself and the world. The final riff is for lifting up your shirt while hanging out the window of a car doing donuts in a parking lot.

Gravecraft intentionally keeps things relatively short compared to our longer songs. The whole thing is built on cycling the same chord progression. We're fans of the bands Witchcraft and Graveyard, especially their early works, and the early demos of this tune were a low-gain lo-fi affair that kind of reminded us of them, so the working title became Gravecraft, and the name stuck.

The working title for Solitario was "Cam Jam" for a long time. Started as a free-form, open-ended thing built on a bass riff. The name Solitario comes from that of a geological formation in the rough southwest Texas desert. The guitar track was actually just intended to be the scratch track when we recorded drums. When it came time to do "real" guitar tracks, it seemed pointless to just recreate what was already there.

Chris' solo at the end was inspired by Steve Winwood and fits the vibe of the song and the landscape for which it is named. We ran his Hammond through my Marshall amp and had it just ridiculously loud. He did one run-through and recorded the solo in one take.

The title track of the album, Signor Morte Improvvisa, is probably our most ambitious work. It is humbly dedicated to, and inspired by, the late, great Ennio Morricone. The main theme had been sitting around for some time. When Maestro Morricone passed away, we took it as a sign to finish the piece.

The spaghetti Western influence is obvious. We, and a lot of people, love that music and the vibe it invokes. You can hear it and see the landscape to which it was attached in classic films.

We also wanted to keep it true to ourselves and not just try to ape somebody else's style, like some sort of cheap costume. The riff happened first, then the associated influence came to us during the creative process, and we decided to ride that fuckin' snake to Valhalla.

We fleshed out the structure and jammed on it, adding layers, and developing ideas. I made a mockup choir part with some notation software at home, not thinking anyone else would be into it, let alone that it would come to fruition. Chris did an arrangement, brought in his daughter and a couple other singers, and directed their parts while I pointed mics at them and pushed the record. Pretty proud of the results.

For good measure there's a Black Sabbath easter egg as the track fades out into the sunset, closing out a record we all worked on pretty hard and closing out the chapter of 2020-2022 when we created Signor Morte Improvvisa and Acid Universe concurrently.