I was about 16 when I wrote Diamond Rise and it’s the earliest song I still make any claim too.
It was 1992-ish give or take a few months. Silent Lucidity had inspired me to add guitar to what would soon become an ever growing list of instruments I play. I’d spent the past couple years both kinda dating a young lady and, at the same time, going through the rough process of coming out to myself and all that entails.
I remember a lot of the pain that caused both of us. In all fairness I told her before we began our month of official dating. Then year or two of unofficial dating/hanging out was an interesting symphony in … pain and confusion. I liked her, cared about her, and clearly wanted to be close to her. She wanted the closeness in a different way, however, than I was realizing I could offer.
I was tired of it all - the pain in my eyes and the pain in hers. I won’t even more than mention the brief time when I was in love with her best friend, he with her, and she with me. There was no romance in any of it. Just anguish mixed with awkward camaraderie.
I don’t think I ever read either of them the lyrics. I don’t think I even played it outside writing it by myself. And I’m not sure who the song was really written to - me or her. But there it was: the desire to be somewhere far from pain, to live in this mythical and magical world where everything was beauty and peace...
12 years later I’m living in Brooklyn, NY and I suddenly have the means for recording my music. Armed with ProTools and Reason I set about something of a mammoth task - trying to reconstruct a song I'd written over a decade prior using only a bare minimum of actual live instruments (guitar, bass, and vocals). The irony came circle - that I had gone to college to study composition to orchestrate rock songs only to end with a degree in performance of classical music. Now here I was putting Diamond Rise together at long last.
Overall I kept most of the writing I’d done back then[*]. What was once more electric did become more acoustic. Some of the lyrics got revised - still on the naive side but a little more mature. But the structure, the chord progressions and most of the guitar riffs remained - even some bits of the orchestration! (Yeah, I was already throwing in random key changes at that age! LOL)
I have yet to ever perform Diamond Rise.
- Okay. Writer's geek moment. My favorite spot is that lone G# in the solo around 2'50". Something about it just has that extra kick of passion and always catches my ear. *heee* Yes, the whole song AND THAT.
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