Ouroboros

During our band practices, we like to warm up by free-styling a jam. Zach usually starts with a riff and everyone else finds something cool to add. One day, I started the warmup jam with a keyboard melody. It didn't take long before the others found their parts, but unlike the normal mess we create to shake the dust off with, this sounded like a real song. I hit record on my phone and we played the same part for five minutes (that part would later be the verse.) It just kept looping into itself so fluidly. Obviously that recording gets old pretty fast, but I took that and built it into a song.

The chorus sounded like an extension of the verse, which only added to the circular sound of the song. As I started creating a vocal melody, I found the feeling was the song struck me as rather angry. This led to lyrics that were descriptive of people in power, whether that be CEOs, politicians, wannabe kings, or anything else.

These various pieces of the song's feeling drew me to an ouroboros, the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. It was perfect, I thought, as it reflected exactly what I was writing about.

On the whole of Rust, Ouroboros represents the anger I felt after opening my eyes to the true state of our planet. And not just the anger, but who I was angry at. I hope you find it cathartic to scream the final lines like I do, especially on a bad day.

Art by Laekyn Cogan