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Singled Out: Civil War's First to Fight

10/16/2013
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Today Daniel Myhr from Civil War tells us about the song "First to Fight" from their debut album "The Killer Angels," which the band released this summer. Here is the story:

First of all I would like to clarify that I don't really remember that much of how the songs "came to life" during the making of The Killer Angels. It was just one day there when I just realized that we have a finished album. But one of the songs that I remember most (luckily), was the one that turned into "First to Fight" which also became our last teaser-single before the album was released.

One day Patrik sent me a basic demo of a song that he just called "Dr. Evil". It was thrashy and had a dirty sound with a great vocal-line. He asked me to do something with the guitars for it. I had lots of ideas in my head of how I wanted it to sound, but since I kinda lack some skills in guitar playing I kinda got stuck in it. I just couldn't play it the way my head wanted it. But Patrik had also asked another guy to figure out the guitar-parts for it. The guy's name was Petrus and he had actually managed to play it exactly like I wanted it in my head. So I had a talk with Petrus and told him that we wanted to use his arrangement of it since it sounded the way I wanted. And since we were both kinda sh*tfaced at the time of the conversation we quickly came to an agreement. So the problem was solved.

So after that I got a demo from him with alternative lyrics. At the time it was called "One with the Galaxy", and it had a lovely line with an "invasion of robots and spiders from mars". I just loved that lyrics since I am a bit of a Doctor Who-fan. It was melodic, it had the power I wanted for it. It just felt perfect.

So the recordings just went on for the album as usual. But when we were gonna record vocals for "One with the Galaxy" Patrik told that he had re-written the lyrics. It was now about the Polish elite-force G.R.O.M. This made me think over the melodic guitar-part of the song a bit too, to fit the subject, but I didn't have to do much about it. We just took away the melody and made it more "straight in your face". We had now gotten everything done for the song. All that was left was to record the drums. On the demo it was a typical "rammdammadimdimfrafrafrafrafrafratakkatakkatakkaBOOMBOOMding"-introfill on the drums. But we gave Mullback free hands to do it how he wanted it, and when we got the raw mix of the song back from the studio we were just totally blown away. Mullback had just done the thing that we all love, but never tried before. Simple, totally unimpressive, almost out of beat but extremely lovely intro-fill. For me that fill is almost 90% of the actual song. Even if I love the whole song itself, that fill just represent a part of us that never was possible back in the days. But now we had it. We were totally happy with it. So there we were, a drum-intro that went straight to our hearts, followed by a song that went to the rest of our bodies. That's "First to Fight" for you!

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album right here!

Civil War CDs, DVDs and MP3s

Civil War T-shirts and Posters

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