Right at the beginning
It’s been a long time coming
There’s something in creating a concept album that reminds me of the fairytale called Elisa and her 12 brothers, the tale writes of Elisa who has to knit overalls made of stinging nettles to save her brothers The catch is that she cannot talk about what she is actually doing until she finishes her project, if she breathes a word, her brothers die. ( a complimentary remake of the whole tale is at the bottom of this entry…compliments of your royal madness)
Little did I know that with Twisted Tales, I was going to be taking a journey somewhat akin to Elisa. Except that the forces that be don’t really hold your brothers ransom.
Just your sanity.
Also bad, because your sanity is probably important.
So like Elisa’s work on the stinging nettles jerseys…
the process of Twisted Tales is at times painful, we can’t speak about it,And random people want to burn you for loafing around (as opposed to burning you for witchcraft)
But nevertherless, here we are, we are just a little more than 1 week away from release of the first single, there are stories and surprises in store, much goodies for my lovely and patient spiderlings, so let’s go back to the very beginning shall we? There is now much to share.
Of lost minds and writer’s floods
My manager, Lee McIver, decided that it was time to put my muses to work. We had met at Singapore’s International Arts Festival through Austrade and the first idea he put me onto was writing a new album…his suggestion unleashed a very loud kind of silent panic for me, which I kept very secret.
You see, after my debut album Spiked Soul, I had the worst case of the writer’s flood.
Before you congratulate me, and tell me to stop whining about nothing, let me explain that the end result of a writer’s flood is the same as the writer’s block, you finish nothing. The key difference is that I think the writer’s flood kills a lot more innocent trees than a Writer’s block.
I’m talking paper paper everywhere but not a page of use…
It’s hard to explain what caused the writer’s flood, I have a theory that this is somewhat the equivalent of a superpower gone out of control. So before you know it I am flouncing about the studio like some mutant musical word monster making no sense at all…not a pretty sight.
After much paranoia (oh my GAWD! I’ll NEVER WRITE AGGGGAAAAAIIINNN!!!!) and many hours of creative paralysis I realised that the only way to rein all that madness in was to write with very strict and limited rules – everything they tell you NOT to do in songwriting 101.
Why Fairytales?
I’d tell you that it was because of my dad…who always told me really remixed versions of fairytales…to a point where I remember getting in trouble with humourless school authorities. Dad’s version of 3 little pigs ended with Don Corleone from the Godfather being hired to kill the big bad wolf. I can tell you that I wanted to up the ante and hence made Twisted Tales, a concept album about rogue fairytales come to live in our universe.
Thing is like all tales, the truth is much less colourful than that…but no less stranger.
Twisted Tales is the result of Link Roulette partly played on stumbleupon.com
3 links that’s all, then pick one.
1st link – NSFW video of girls and eels – doesn’t count, internet is being a dick
2nd link – Eyeball tattoos – doesn’t count, internet is being a dick
3rd link – Fairy tales. – Ah well. Lucky me.
The rest as they say, is Twisted Tales history.
Your Royal Madness’ remake of Elisa and the 12 brothers
There is a tale of once upon a time, which features a girl, Elisa with 12 brothers. Like almost all stories, her father, the king is judgement impaired and marries a beautiful but insane woman scientist who practiced cutting-edge genetic engineering and found Elisa and her brothers to be ideal test subjects.
The Queen changed her 12 brothers into swans and sends them away. It is worth pointing out that since her process was still in beta, the mutation reverts itself on a 12 hour cycle – the brothers become human at night. She also tries to zombify Eliza but ran out of Datura and Tetratodoxins – important zombie ingredients. Queen banishes her Elisa in frustration and spends hours of retail therapy on ebay.
Alone in the banishment forest, Elisa stumbles onto a hippie colony and finds a herbalist who claims that knitting nettles into shirts will reverse her brothers’ bird mutation. Elisa decides to give this a try, she is also told that she must also take a vow of silence until the task is done for speaking one word will kill her brothers. Given that banishment meant that she was unable to afford basic healthcare insurance, she decided that this time consuming but affordable form of alternative gene therapy was probably the way to go, she decides to give this knitting thing a try.
While knitting, the following events take place to make her blistering task even more blisterer.
– A king walks by, decides she looks fetching, and marries her
– The Archbishop gets jealous that the king is now spending time with her, and trolls her with accusations of witchcraft
– The witchcraft PR campaign was very effectively run through social networks, and it was finally recommended that she be burnt at the stake by public demand
Despite all these distractions, Elisa continues knitting…random humans can be so distracting.
Just before the executioner prepares her barbecue, she tosses her near finished nettle garments to her brother swans waiting just outside the burn zone. Her brothers change back to homo sapiens, everybody’s happy. She’s declared innocent. (YAY Pom Poms all round!!)
Except the archbishop who was badly flamed for being a troll and is now bleeding money from libel suits (ok so it didn’t happen in the original…this is a your royal madness’ remake, (I think I’m allowed – Storyteller’s privilege – just ask the self righteous, female character lobotomising, moral imbuing storyteller Charles Perrault)
Till next time
Love,
Your Royal Madness
Yunyu
Next up: Collaborations, Manga artist Queenie Chan, Animators The Commonists.