The Beta Machine (A Perfect Circle) Singled Out Week: Embers

03-31-2019

The Beta Machine, which features A Perfect Circle's Matt McJunkins and Jeff Friedl, just released their debut album "Intruder" and to celebrate we asked Matt to tell us about some of the songs. Today he tells us about "Embers". Here is the story:

This song is quite near and dear to us. Ended up as a bit of a latecomer to the 'Intruder' album. We were kicking around a loose version of the song with the skeleton of what you hear now as the finished song. But we had that demo for a long time and were kinda stumped on it.

Once we got into a room and started tracking some different rhythmic ideas with the drums and the bass and finding the space for all the parts, the rest of the music came together rather quickly.

Then once we started kicking around vocal ideas there was this sort of chant thing that existed for a long time. The part that you now hear as the bridge was one of the first melodic lines that helped shape the tone of the song.

And the meaning behind the song is maybe one of the most personal lyrics I've ever written and is about something incredibly hard to talk about but I felt like I needed an outlet for some of these things and writing about it and putting these thoughts that haunt me almost everyday into a song that has a somewhat uplifting sonic quality to it, it felt rather empowering. And it's emotionally probably the hardest song I'll ever have to sing, but it's an absolute catharsis every time we play it.

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