Singled Out: Savage Existence's A Thousand Pounds of Trainwreck

Keavin Wiggins | 03-17-2022

Album art

Savage Existence recently released a video for their song "A Thousand Pounds of Trainwreck", from their debut album, "Animals", and to celebrate we asked guitarist Daniel Cleland to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

Back in 2003, me and Jesse Radford our drummer were just finished college in London, Ontario and we were living in a four bedroom house with another one of our buddies. We had a jam room set up in the basement and me and Jesse used to write music and play songs, just the two of us, with him on drums and me on guitar.

We had about five or six songs that we used to play and record on a simple tape recorder. A Thousand Pounds of Trainwreck was one of those songs and the reason we called it that was not because of the lyrics, which were not written until we recorded the actual song here in Costa Rica in 2021, but because it was one of the heaviest songs we had at that time and it felt like A Thousand Pounds of Trainwreck was a heavy name for a heavy song.

Back in those days we were also straight up human train wrecks as young, dumb 20-somethings living together in a heavy-metal household doing all the things you might imagine guys like us doing back in those days. It was really good times though.

Even though the name of this song wasn't originally based on the lyrics of the song, the name of the song does actually correspond its steady chugging riffs that sound like a train chugging along the tracks, like the opening intro to the song building up to the main verse riff that resembles a freight train going at full speed. We took that imagery and wrote the lyrics to the song based on a concept that the band AND the song are like a freight train carrying molten steel at rapid speeds and not stopping for anything! Which is true!

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