After 14 years, Mike Scalzi has finally put the “Lord” and the “Weird” back into The Lord Weird Slough Feg. But more importantly, he’s recorded and brand new LP of fantasy and historical non-fiction-inspired heavy metal. New Organon is due out on June 14 via the venerable Cruz Del Sur Music, but we’ve got the stunning title-track available right now for your earholes. We’ll let our man Mike provide the explicit here, then you can jam the tune below.
“The song is basically about Aristotle and the primitive inductive method developed in the ancient world– and how this was amended by “modern” thinkers in the 1600’s into what we now call “scientific method” (sounds like a real sizzler eh?) The book “The New Organon” by Francis Bacon is sort of revisionist of the Aristotle’s original “Organon” (which technically means: tool or instrument for attaining knowledge), introducing, among other things, experimentation and manipulation of data into those methods that had dominated philosophical, scientific and religious thinking for the past 2000 years. Although this may sound like purely academic and somewhat sterile, it can appear dramatic against the right musical background.
The guitar riff came out of the drum beat, the vocal melody out of the guitar riff, and the lyrics out of the vocal melody—the song basically wrote itself. There was something catchy about the initial drum and guitar gallop, and the chord change down to E came into my head, followed by the climbing part, which came to be a sort of chorus. Within five or 10 minutes the whole thing was written, musically that is. The epic “middle riff,” which is sort of the Lizzy-esque crescendo of the songs I had already come up with months before and had on tape at home, but it fit the song perfectly so I put it in there as the sort of instrumental climax. But other than that—it was one minute just a drum beat, the next minute, practically a full song–and that’s often the way the best most memorable songs are written—after the initial spark you simply step aside and let it write itself (a task which is harder than it sounds). Once the melody for the verse was established, it all followed lyrically out of that initial line. We ended up debuting it live, opening for Manilla Road her in San Francisco, almost three years ago, and it has been tried and tested live (according to strict Baconian experimental methodology!), staying in the Slough Feg set ever since!”
Pre-order New Organon right here!
