Backwards – A crisis of faith

Our new alternative rock / alternative metal song Backwards is dealing with a crisis of faith. Most of us have broken peace with God at some point, but in Christian belief, forgiveness will come freely, turning our expectations backwards. I am very happy to have teamed up with an international band. Backwards turned out as a real banger.

You will never guess how “Backwards” started. In 2021, Michael, a befriended musician, worked on an epic rock opera about time travelling and contacted me to turn his lyrics into a song. While writing this song, it turned out that the original lyrics were too long. They would have resulted in a 15-minute song, which is why we decided to stop the collab. Michael turned his lyrics into a different song, where much more lyrics could be fitted – and I continued on the instrumental. It took another two years until my instrumental draft was good enough to search for instrumentalists. Pekka recorded drums, Scott recorded guitars, but we still lacked of a vocalist, lead guitarist and bassist. The hardest part was, that I could not get Michael’s original lyrics out of my head, so I also needed a lyricist. The halfway recorded draft stuck for many months, because we needed a certain vocal timbre within a certain range to use the original melody. I was close to giving up, until Molly uploaded a great song in a similar style onto her SoundCloud profile. Though I’ve been following her for years, her new song had that special something that reminded me of my draft of “Backwards”, which is why I sent it to her. Everything after went super quick – Molly wrote lyrics, brought a new melody and recorded a stunning vocal take. She brought her nephew Brinden, who improvised the lead solo. After 4 years of hard work, our song feels right and complete.

As it’s very important for me that band members align with the song, I give them a lot of creative freedom. Molly enjoys writing about spirituality, so the lyrics deal with the inner struggle with God. When rebellion and pride meet humility and obedience, we have to decide which side to take, and in this case, the protagonist runs backwards while realizing that God’s grace and forgiveness is free. As written above, Brinden’s solo is fully improvised, while Scott picked his own guitar sound. Pekka added some double bass action and new fills, making this song a big heavier as planned. All in all, I am very happy with the result.

“Backwards” is now available on all streaming platforms and soon will be part of the Bandcamp subscription. Thank you so much for collaborating!