I write this first entry on the anniversary of D-Day... ironic that I am writing a piece called "Ordinary World" on a day that was one of the most un-ordinary in human history.
This project started about a week ago. I came a cross a book written by Christopher Vogler caled "The Writer's Journey". The book is a guide to screenwriters and authors describing the main structure of "a hero's journey". He argues that in almost any hero's tale, whether it be in mythology, Star Wars, Lord Of The Rings, or even Beverly Hills Cop, these stories follow a certain outline... phases of the journey that are in any hero movie or story. In coming across this book, I thought that these principles could also be applied to music. Indeed, albums like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" and Queensryche's "Operation Mindcrime" follow a very similar structure.
My goal is to adapt these principles to tell a story in an instrumental album. Instead of telling the story lyrically, I want to leave the story to the interpretation of the listener. Your hero you are thinking of may not be the hero I am thinking of, but these pieces of music could be used in any of our interpretations.
I am well into the first piece of music. The beginning of any story starts with a sense of normalcy. Nothing crazy or out of the ordinary has happened yet, and everything in our hero's world is, for the most part, as it should be. "Ordinary World" to me is a standard instrumental piece I feel illustrates that.
This piece actually came about from a section of music I wrote not long after my very first album back in 2008. This little 20 second piece of music I never recorded sat in the back of my head for years waiting for me to do something with it. Not a terribly fast or slow piece, it's a steady ride through normal life for our hero. I imagine the character Sergeant Murtaugh from "Lethal Weapon" or the kids from "Red Dawn"... regular family man going to work as a cop... kids going to another uneventful day at school. None of these characters know that soon they will be thrust into something much bigger than they ever imagined.