Thank you Loren (and everybody else of course) for the kind words.
Loren, your comment is a song in itself :-)
Wonderful.
You made think about my own song :-)

You know, being a non-native speaker (although I am pretty fluent in English) I'm always concerned about what my songs actually convey to the listener. I don't know exactly how words "feel" to an English mother tongue. I just don't know. I'm always concerned about that, cause I don't have full control of it, no matter how fluent I am.
But then again, this is true for everything we do and say, even in our own language.
The subjective interepretation of songs (and everything else, really) is, by definition, subjective.
Songs belong to the listeners.
And that's really a magic thing.
So, it was wonderfully surprising to read how different is your interpretation of the song (and the feelings that it conveyed to you) from my own.

So, if you're interested, when I wrote this song I thought that steam trains could be a metaphor for history. History as it happens, history that sometimes goes where we want it to go, and sometimes it doesn't. History that keeps going, keeps running, over and with everybody and everything. History that sometimes seem pretedermined by the powerful (as if it was running on "tracks" that we don't control) but, in the end, it always feeds on the "blood", on the "will" of the powerless, whom are never truly really powerless. History that, nonetheless, does give us meaning - or, at least, we try to (and have to) find meaning and purpose in it, because that's what can give us some sense of "not living in vain", in the end. Even though maybe, just maybe, it's really just a running train and we are mere passengers. We just don't know. But we better live like this wasn't the case.
And the "cinematic finale" is mostly an expression of hope. Hope that, in the end, history will take us in a good place - that we will take ourselves in a good place.

But, again, songs belong to the listeners. I truly believe it. My own reading of my own song it's just that, just a reading. It's not the "true" meaning. Songs have a life of their own, independent from the writer.

Finally, to answer your question about the finale, I used no BIAB in this song. The finale is just a bunch of tracks with several midi strings parts played individually with a midi keyboard, and then edited of course (violins, basses, horns, cellos and violas, if I remember correctly, but I can be more precise if you want).

Thank you again!




Last edited by Jon Thomas; 11/09/17 08:29 PM.