Fury In The Slaughterhouse + Me - parts 2 & 3

When I was in Germany in 2008, I asked Thorsten what was going to happen with the members of the band after Fury packed it in. He pointed out to me that pretty much everyone was a musician and that they were probably going to keep making music, just in different forms.

The Driftland album - track it down!

Sure enough, Kai and Thorsten formed Wingenfelder:Wingenfelder (who would eventually be renamed to just Wingenfelder, despite the fact that Kai's solo album 'Alone' had also been released under the name Wingenfelder – no, that's not confusing at all), Rainer Schumann released a solo album under just his last name, Christof formed a band called Wohnraumhelden (Living Room Heroes), Christian I think started working with a charity and Gero, well, we'll get to what Gero was up to later because it's too funny to rush through. Kai also founded a record label called Burrofeliz, and he also has a Celtic-styled band called Baltic Sea Child. Thorsten also put out one solo album under the name Driftland, and one under his own name.

I have done my best to get all of the things the guys have been up to over the years. It's a bit of a challenge because of the language barrier, but I'm pretty good at finding things. I didn't know about Wohnraumhelden until after I got back, so I just recently picked their albums up, but most of the rest of the things, I've either had them imported through Amazon.DE (the German branch of Amazon) or found them on iTunes. Finding what Burrofeliz has put out has been a lot harder. I found the band Subwave early on, but only recently found another band on the label called Porno Pony. There might be other releases – I should remember to ask Kai.

A couple of years later, Kai and Thorsten joined Facebook, and lo and behold, they each sent me a friend request, which I gladly accepted. I'd been getting the Wingenfelder records imported from German, and while the lyrics were all in German, I enjoyed the songs themselves even if I had to muddle through a Google translation to understand what they were singing about.

The Furies reunited for a single show in 2013, but they made it clear that it was likely a one-off. I thought about trying to get out to Germany for the show, but the option didn't seem all that viable.

The Wingenfelder poster from Soren, and my messy desk

In 2014, Wingenfelder started crowdfunding the recording of their next album. I kicked in a chunk of change for the album, but because I was reading the entire process in translation, I made a mistake in what rewards I wanted to get. Which meant I hadn't actually signed up for a copy of the new album itself! The challenge of working through a language barrier. So I contacted the crowdfunding organizers through the site and an admin for the band, Sören, corrected the mistake for me, ensuring I would still get a copy of the new album. And Sören also offered to mail me one of the spare posters that Wingenfelder had from their acoustic tour. I mailed Kai, Thorsten and Sören each a copy of my self-published novel, “Escaping Heaven,” as my way of saying thanks.

As part of the crowd funding, the brothers sent me a postcard from the studio, which I put into my book of concert tickets. That's also where you can find the signed copy of the “Brilliant Thieves” CD sleeve as well as the backstage page from the final show. I didn't have actual ticket stubs from the Fury shows. But that's okay. Sometimes it's something even better.

Now we leap forward to 2016. In February, pictures of the band altogether again in a studio were posted to their Facebook, and it was clear something was happening. On March 9^th, 2016 (although I think it was March 10^th in Germany), Fury In The Slaughterhouse released a new song to Hanover's FFN radio. It was called “30 (It's Not Easy).” Thankfully, FFN broadcasts through the Internet, and since it was a Wednesday night for me, I was over at my weekly boardgame night with a bunch of my friends. When the song came on, I stepped away from the games for a few minutes, put in my headphones and listened with a huge grin on my face.

Horror of horrors, the stream cut out in the middle of the song, so I missed about a minute's worth of the three and a half minute song. And while I was annoyed that the stream had cut out, it was such a great song that I didn't mind that much. The old magic was back, even if I didn't hear all of it. That said, as soon as I got home that night, I posted to the Fury In The Slaughterhouse Facebook group, asking if anyone had recorded it on the radio to share, as I'd missed part of the song because the internet stream had dropped on me in the middle.

About twenty minutes later, after I'd gotten a fairly scratchy version from one of the fans, I got a message from Kai, and he personally sent me the mp3 for the song itself. I was ecstatic. It was a very strong return to form for the band, and I was hopeful that it wasn't going to be the last thing the band was putting out. But it was also announced that the band was going to play a 30^th anniversary show in Hanover at TUI Arena in 2017. One single show. But it was only the initial spark.

Things blossomed quickly for the band after that first announcement. One show turned into two. Two shows turned into three. And when three shows in their hometown of Hanover wasn't enough, it turned into a tour. I was very interested in going to the shows, but money in the spring of 2016 was tight. People asked on the Fury page if I was coming to Germany for some of the tour, like I had back in 2008, and I said while I'd like to, I just didn't have the money needed to travel out and back.

That was when the band said they might be able to help. Things grew quiet for a while, and I just went about my day. A few months later, one plan had fallen through and another had sprung up in its place. There was a crowdfunding movement to try and raise money to get me out to Germany, and the donations came in very quickly. The Fury fanbase is even more than generous than I suspected. Best band in the world, best fans in the world.

By November, there was enough money to cover my plane tickets to and from the US, to cover the train between Frankfurt and Hanover, and to cover the housing at a hotel run by one of the donors. The trip was a go. The band would provide an all access pass for all three of the Hanover shows, and was looking forward to sitting down and talking with me around the shows. I made sure to set the time aside on my calendar.

But there was another thing that happened in between worth mentioning. In June, I got a message from Kai. The band was going to go in the studio at the end of the month to record an EP of new songs. He wanted me to take a quick look at the lyrics for the new songs to check his English, as a native speaker, if I didn't mind.

If I didn't mind.

Ha!

Getting to read Fury In The Slaughterhouse lyrics before anyone else? It was a honor. For the Fury fans who are wondering, I only suggested a few minor tweaks here and there. I offered maybe five or six minor adjustments over all the songs, total. Twenty or thirty letters tops.

I also got to hear the demos for the new songs, and all of them sounded great. In fact, they were some of the strongest songs Kai had written in a long time, in my humble opinion. If I'm totally honest, I kind of wish that he'd written another six or seven songs and made a full album out of it, but hey, you take what you can get. And we as Fury fans were getting a whole lot of amazing new Fury In The Slaughterhouse songs.

Not telling anyone that I knew more songs were coming was hard, but I wanted to respect the trust the band was extending me, so I didn't mention it on the Facebook group. Eventually, though, the band posted pictures of themselves in the studio again, and so people knew something was up. But I remained quiet. My ground rule for anything the band tells me that is upcoming is that I don't tell anyone until I've seen them posting about it themselves, first and foremost. Better to be overly cautious, I figure.

RIP Sören

Towards the end of the year, right around the time the crowdfunding group was buying me plane tickets to and from Germany, the band announced the upcoming release of “30 – The Ultimate Best Of Fury In The Slaughterhouse,” a 2 CD collection of 30 songs that would include the EP with the new songs. But the songs themselves weren't announced, the titles anyway, so I kept silent about it, but I was grinning left and right.

There's a sad shade to the tail end of this chapter, unfortunately. In November of 2015, I got word from Sören that he was in the hospital, battling cancer. I never got a lot of detail about it, but he was trying chemotherapy, trying to purge the cancer from his body. He'd been one of the first people to contribute to the crowdfunding, and I was looking forward to meeting him when I got to Germany, but sadly, Sören Möller passed away on February 11^th, 2017. If there's an afterlife, hopefully he's got a front row seat for the band in heaven. Thanks Sören. You are missed.

The trip to Germany itself was relatively uneventful. I flew from San Francisco to Seattle and then from Seattle to Frankfurt. On the flight up to Seattle, an Icelandic man asked if I could swap seats with him so he could sit with his wife. I was already settled, but I can understand wanting to be next to the one you're with, even if I'm single. I had hoped to sleep on the flight from Seattle to Frankfurt, but there was a child, maybe a year and a half to two years old, who spent most of the flight crying and screaming. Every time I was just about to drift off to sleep, the child would start to scream again and I would get jolted back to consciousness.

Me and Claudia

When I arrived in Frankfurt, I passed through security, and passport control asked what my final destination was. When I said 'Hanover,' they asked if I was in the country for business, but I told them I was going to Hanover for concerts, and the guy at the counter seemed surprised. Then I gathered my suitcase, headed down to the subway, took the subway over to the train station and then hopped on a train to Hildesheim. Staying awake on the train was a challenge, but if I fell asleep on the train, I'd overshoot my destination, as the train went all the way on to Berlin. So I stayed awake.

In Hildesheim, my point of contact on the ground, Claudia, was waiting for me. I'd made friends with most of the people in the Facebook group that had been set up for the crowdfunding movement, and so I knew what Claudia looked like. She welcomed me to Hildesheim, and gave me a lift to the hotel just a little bit away in Giesen. I tried to stay awake, but after just a little bit at the hotel, I headed upstairs and went to bed a little after 7 p.m. local time, and then passed out. I didn't wake up until a little after 9 a.m. the next day, a full 14 hours to get my body clock right.

Claudia was a charming host. The hotel, Hotel Ernst, is a family business, with her and her brother doing most of the management for it, it seems. I took a picture of one of the wooden rafters, where Anno 1605 was inscribed. Four hundred years and change that building's been there. Talk about history. Claudia and I spent a lot of our time talking music – both about the band itself but also about other bands. She'd spent some time in Ireland, and in fact she'd gone to a concert on Tuesday night after I'd gone to bed, a German band called Broilers. (Note: You can hear a lot of the music that Claudia recommended to me in Episode 119 of my podcast.)

For much of the trip, Claudia would also double as my translator. While most of the people associated with the band spoke pretty good English, many of the fans, people who had contributed to getting me to Germany, they often didn't speak more than a handful of words of English, so they were all happy to talk with one another and Claudia would translate for me in the breaks, so I could at least get a general idea of what people were talking about.

I posted that I was awake to my Facebook, and Kai posted that the band was just hanging around the arena for the day, doing some prep work and some media interviews, if I wanted to swing by. Of course, I wanted to spend as much time hanging out with the band as I could, so I told him that I'd be down to the arena in just a few hours. He told me that if I had any trouble getting in, I should just call Benny, their manager, and gave me his number. Of course, Kai posted it to my Facebook page publicly, but he took it down almost immediately and then sent it to me via private message. Oh, Benny, I hope you didn't accidentally get a ton of phone calls.

When I got to the arena, I got a laminate, a backstage pass marked AAA – Access All Areas – for all three of the shows, and the days surrounding it. It meant I could go anywhere, stand anywhere, as long as I didn't get in the way. I've been around an arena in advance of a show before, but it had been a good long while, not since I was a journalist in college.

Press day

It's fun to move through a space designed to hold 12,000 people when there's just 50-100 of you in the entire building. I had a blast just walking into the space, and sure enough, as soon as we're into the arena itself, Kai wanders over to say hello and greet me. He's got a little bit of time to chat before the press shows up, and he's happy to spend some time talking with me about the music industry, about what the band's up to, and a bit about politics.

Politics isn't an uncommon topic of conversation for the entire trip, but I don't mind. I'm in agreement with everyone – I don't really understand what's happened in the US right now, how Trump could possibly have won the election, and how so many people identify with this misogynist, racist asshole. As soon as I tell people how anti-Trump I am, there's always this sigh of relief, as if to say 'oh good, you're one of the sane ones,' and then I get to hear a bit of how the politics of hate is threatening Germany as well.

I also spend a bit of Wednesday talking with Thorsten, who's in good spirits as well. It's a good omen that the brothers are all smiles, even though they're spending part of the day talking to press. I don't see the whole band around – it's just Kai, Thorsten and Rainer, although I do hear that Christof is off doing interviews nearby. There isn't a ton going on today, but it's nice to spend a bit of time chatting with Kai and Thorsten. Tomorrow they tell me will be soundcheck and light testing, if I want to come by, and I tell the guys I'm down for everything, and anything that they invite me to, I will definitely show up for.

Me & Thorsten at soundcheck. Courtesy of Olaf Gebert

Thorsten's getting a bit of a late lunch (or maybe an early dinner) and we talk for a bit about the Driftland album, his solo album and why almost all the Wingenfelder stuff is in German. (The exception is part of 'Off the Record.') He tells me he'd been a good ways into making a second Driftland album when he decided he wasn't feeling a connection to the material, and so he rewrote all the songs to be in German, which became his 360 Degrees Heimat album under his own name.

I told him that part of the reason that I felt like Fury's music, and the Driftland album as well, were so insightful was that they come at English from an unexpected angle, a direction that a native speaker wouldn't necessarily think of. There's a certain insight you get when looking at something you aren't as comfortable with, when something hasn't been ingrained in you as to become reflexive. I tell him that I hope we keep getting more English works from all of the guys, be it as part of Fury or part of Wingenfelder. He tells me he can't make any promises, but my comments about coming at English from a new angle, like Picasso deciding to make a new kind of art, is something for him to definitely think about. He also found it hilarious that I still remembered old Fury songs, like “Anthem of the Hansom Ransom,” which is off "Hookah Hey," the third Fury album, and wanted to ask if it was partially true, and indeed, it was. It was clear from the grin on his face that he hadn't thought about that song in a long, long time.

Claudia and I headed back to the hotel where I grabbed dinner down in the restaurant attached to the hotel. I was happy to take a seat at the bar and watch people coming and going while I eat.

On the way over to Germany, while I was in the Seattle airport, I called my cell provider and asked what it would cost to have internet access while I was over in Germany, and they quoted me a price. A ridiculous, silly, exorbitant price. So I decided I would just stick to WiFi while I was over there, and at first, the hotel was the only place I had internet access, so I was checking email and posting to Facebook while I was at the bar.

One thing I did notice over dinner, however, was this strange concoction – a glass half filled with beer and half filled with Coke. Apparently it's a thing in Germany. They call it diesel. They also have a similar thing called spezi, which is half Coke and half Fanta. Apparently there's actually a bottled version of it called Mezzo Mix, but getting it mixed fresh is better. I developed a taste for spezi while I was in Germany last time, but you can get a close approximation to it here in the states with Orange Coke from the Coke Freestyle machines. It's not the same, though. I didn't feel bold enough to try diesel. I know it's sacrilegious, but I'm not really a beer drinker.

"Dolly" and me, at breakfast

Thursday was soundcheck day. Thorsten had told me they were starting up at around 2, so we headed over a bit before that. Before that, though, I got to meet Dolly. Eberhard “Dolly” Doleczik was the crowdfunding program's link to the band. I got the impression that he's an old friend of Kai's, and everyone in the band seemed to know him, and talked about him fondly. Dolly was in the army for a while, and has both of his motorcycles detailed with Fury related images. His English isn't spectacular, but it's certainly better than my German.

The soundcheck was fun. I was still getting used to just being able to walk into the back door of Tui arena, but the laminate definitely granted me access. Before I'd gotten the pass, I'd had to wait outside of the gate, not even able to enter the parking lot until we called Benny and they gave us permission to come up to the door itself and get the pass, but now the guy at the gate just saw the laminate and gave me a little wave. I stopped and chatted with him a couple of times over the week, although his English was hit and miss, but he was friendly enough.

When I got there, they were about an hour from starting, and I had a bit of time to talk with Kai again. He gave me one of the first copies of the new Ultimate 30 Special Edition, taking a minute to get all the members of the band to autograph it for me. They were still doing some final tweaks to the show, so they were going to run through a bunch of the songs for soundcheck, maybe half of each song, just so they were comfortable with it.

After Kai gives me the CD, he has some things to review before soundcheck, so he heads off, and a little bit later, I see Gero walking through the arena, taking pictures of the stage. I barely talked to Gero when I met the band in 2008. I knew he played a bunch of instruments, but he'd also been the most off-the-radar since they'd packed it in back then. He also recognized me immediately, and wandered over to say hi.

This time I got a chance to ask a question that had been bugging me for a long time. Fury's album “Brilliant Thieves” opens with the song “Bring Me Home,” but before it, there's a track called “Intro” (which isn't in the above video for the song) that the liner notes said was performed by Gero Drnek, and was from his upcoming solo album. For years, I've been looking to try and find any trace of that album, all to no avail. But now I could ask Gero all about it. I'd been nervous about talking to Gero before. Hell, I'd been nervous about talking to all of the band back in 2008, but in the intervening years, I'd gained a lot more confidence, and talking with Kai a bit the year before had helped me with that. I wanted each of the band members to deal with me on their comfort level. If they wanted to talk a little, I'd stay out of their way. If they wanted to talk a little more than a little, well, I'd happily talk with them as much as they felt comfortable with.

Gero at soundcheck

Gero, as charming as he is, is happy to talk. A lot. And he's a great conversationalist.

As it turns out, Gero never released that solo album. “All of my friends would love for me to,” he told me with a smile on his face, “just so they could talk badly about it.” I ask what he's been up to since the band went on hiatus and the first thing that he tells me is that he's been happily at home, cooking. That he's replaced his love of music with his love of cooking. I'm still not entirely sure how much he was kidding and how much he was being serious. He's sly like that.

I mention that I'm surprised with all the instruments he can play that he wasn't constantly busy with other musical projects. I know he played with a few of the other guys with a Hanover musician named Kuersche on a few live albums, but other than that, he's been completely off the radar. “Nobody called me,” he sniffed, a hint of amusement in his voice. “Some of my friends thought I must be busy. Some of them were afraid of me, I think! So I sat at home. An unemployed musician.” I couldn't tell who was more tickled by that, him or me.

I asked Gero how it was, the band being back together again, and he seems to grin. He says the band's energy has changed, back towards what it used to be, that they feel better. It's a story I'll hear a lot over the next few days. Things are better, far better now than they used to be. And the more I hang with the band, the more I can feel the energy, the comfort. It's a bit like falling in love again with someone you haven't seen in a long time. The arguments are all in the rear view mirror and you can't even remember what you were fighting about.

They're older, wiser and when the soundcheck starts, it's easy to see they're all still enjoying each other's company. A little later, I talk to Christof for a bit, and tell him how much I loved the guitar tones in the demo for “My Personal Everest,” and he smiles a bit at that. He tells me that when they were recording the demo for that, it was the moment when it felt like they were all back where they needed to be, when they'd recaptured the old magic and everything was healed.

The band plays through parts of a bunch of numbers, and they're in good musical shape. They've shaken the rust off and I can see them playing off of one another here and there, goofing around. Having fun. And that warms my heart, more than the access, more than talking to the band, more than getting to stand behind the barricades, more than getting to sit and eat dinner with them... I'm happiest most that they're happy again.

On the satellite stage, at soundcheck

There's a point in the middle of the sound check, when the band is practicing one of their acoustic songs, and they all walk out onto the little satellite stage, and sit down, and Kai calls out to me. “Hey Cliff,” he says, then he tells me that when he wrote this particular song, “When God Goes Home,” the lyrics felt just as relevant then as they do now. 

“There are mad dogs in our governments / With dollar bills and guns in hands /Building walls then knock'em down / First destroy then buy the town / They write the book of history / With lots of blood and misery / Every page is drowned in red / Sleep well in your bed...”

You can see why they're particularly poignant now. He'll tell a variation of the same story to the crowds, in German, over the next few nights, but at the soundcheck, it feels like it's just for me.

Kai's had hip surgery not too long ago, so he heads out part way through the soundcheck, so he can rest up and be tip top for the next three nights, but the rest of the guys hang around to push through some more songs. I notice that Christof isn't smoking on stage, which sort of amazes me. The last time I saw the band, it seemed like Christof had three cigarettes going simultaneously at all times. In fact, apparently he even had the nickname “Piff Puff” for the longest time. When Thorsten comes out to chat after the soundcheck, I point out how surprised I am, and I'm told that Christof has given up smoking, mostly given up drinking, no more drugs... and now he's doing, of all things, yoga. I shit you not, I would've paid good money to see Christof doing yoga, but I know it's true because I see someone chiming in on one of his Facebook posts not long after that they were missing him at yoga class.

After all the rest of the band has taken off, Christof is still wandering around on stage with an acoustic guitar, simply enjoying the space, noodling and playing snippets of melody. When we're about to leave, I tell him how proud I am that he quit smoking, that my father smoked for half a century and I know it can be a bitch of a habit to kick. He tells me that sometimes his left hand wants to reach for a cigarette, but his right hand slaps it down, and keeps him good. But he admits it's been good for him, and I suspect it's been good for the band as well. I tell him not to stay up too late – tomorrow, they're back in front of an audience.

Fury In The Slaughterhouse + Me - Part 1

I've been back almost a week now as I start writing this, and I think I'm starting to be able to get my head around it. So let me tell you the story of my time with the best band in the world and the best fans in the world. It's hard to pry apart where exactly to begin the tale, considering all the moving pieces and bits.

Near the very end of my trip, Gero, the band's multi-instrumentalist, took my hands and offered me this piece of advice, “write the whole truth.” It felt like a moment out of the movie “Almost Famous,” which was apropos of the entire trip. So I'm going to endeavor to tell the whole tale, warts and all, and let you decide for yourself if you agree with my assessment.

On February 13^th, 1994, the MTV show “120 Minutes” aired a video for a song called “Every Generation Got Its Own Disease” from a band I'd never heard of. The band was Fury In The Slaughterhouse. I immediately fell in love with the song. The show aired at 11 p.m. on Sunday night, and ran, as the title implied, two hours long. I had to set up a VCR timer recording so I could watch the show when I got home from school Monday evening. The video would air two more times on 120 Minutes. The song would go on to chart, breaking the top 20 of the Modern Rock charts, and just grazing the top 20 of the main Rock charts, charting at 21.

The more recent Homer's store front.

A few days later I went down to Homer's, my local record shop, and they didn't have a copy of the band's US debut, “Mono,” in stock, but they put it on order for me and I picked it up a few days later. It had come out the previous year in the band's home country of Germany, and the US version had a different track listing. The album was just as good as that killer song I heard, and I listened to it over and over again for much of the spring.

The band would come through my home town of Omaha, opening for Meatloaf, in July, but of course, it being '94 and the Internet still being in its infancy, I didn't know about that until after the band had come and gone. It would've been my one chance to see my favorite band in my hometown, but I missed it. I had to hear from friends later how they'd heard this opening band before they saw Meatloaf, and did I know anything about them? It's the kind of thing that makes you want to hurt friends, honestly.

In 1995, “The Hearing and the Sense of Balance,” the band's second US album (their fifth, if you don't the live album “Pure Live”) came out, but the first single, “Dancing In The Sunshine Of The Dark,” didn't make an impact stateside. The band had found touring the US extremely grueling – the distance between the cities, the amount of time spent in transit, battling the language barrier – and they didn't come back to tour the country again. The album wasn't as immediately accessible as “Mono,” but it was still a great record nonetheless.

If I hadn't been so taken by the music, that would've probably been the end of the story. The world is full of amazing bands that put out one or two great albums, then disappear into the night. But at this point in my life, I've got a little bit of journalistic training, and I've spent the last few years learning about this new thing called 'the Internet.'

Now, keep in mind, I was a good investigator, but I was still an 18 year old kid who didn't speak any German, and Google Translate was still a long ways away. Hell, Google the company wouldn't even be founded for another 3 years. But I searched the web for a while and found there were a number of fansites created for the band, mostly in German. Still, I decided to try my luck and started sending emails to the people running the sites, seeing if anyone could help me. After all, there were 3 albums the band had put out that I didn't have, and I was eager to track them down.

Only one person responded, a guy named Nils, who was about my age. Nils agreed to help me, sending me Fury stuff from Germany if I would send him music from America. He loved a singer called Heather Nova, which was where we started. He sent me the older albums, and I sent music in return. Nils also became my link to understanding a bit of the history about the band.

He sent me t-shirts and the side project, Little Red Riding Hood, that some of the band members had put out, and I sent him plenty of things in return. That relationship continued well into my college years, as the band continued to put out new albums in Germany, and Nils continued to ship them to me. I still have the “Hang the DJ” shirt he sent me in 1996 or 1997, although it's pretty worn on the back at this point. Eventually, Nils lost contact, and I started getting things from Amazon, using their German site.

For years, I'd wonder if the band was going to give it another go stateside, or if the missed Meatloaf concert had been my one opportunity to see the band I loved most play live. But in 2008, the band announced they were going to be packing it in at the end of the year. They had been putting out an album every couple of years, and while they still had a strong following, they weren't as widely loved as they were at their peak.

Each of the albums have good songs on them, but some of the latter albums were certainly weaker than the earlier ones. I've been asked a number of times, so I might as well commit it to paper. My favorite Fury In The Slaughterhouse album is 1997's “Brilliant Thieves” and my least favorite is 2002's “The Color Fury.” I can say good things all day long, but let's talk about why “The Color Fury” is my least favorite album for a minute.

There are great songs on “The Color Fury,” like all Fury albums - “Things Like This,” “Angels & Saints,” “Boomtown Babylon,” and “Shape Of Things To Come” are all fine songs – but the misses feel more significant, because they aren't bad songs. They're just underdeveloped. I've heard that during the recording of almost all of “The Color Fury” each of the band members was in different places, and they didn't sit down and just play all the songs in a room together and polish them up. I'm not sure if that's true, but it certainly feels that way.

The songs on “The Color Fury” that don't work might have gotten there if the band had spent more time working as a group to get them into better shape. They feel like unfinished sketches, demos that haven't quite come to completion yet. I'd like to think that if the band had been working together on them, they would've blossomed, but instead, the album comes across as unfinished demos, in need of another couple of coats of paint.

I know Kai, the band's lead singer, said in an interview recently that he felt they could've skipped their last album, “Every Heart Is A Revolutionary Cell,” but I would disagree with him on that front. There's several very solid songs on the album - “As Long As You Believe In Me,” “Here We Go,” “Wasted,” “P.O.W.” for example – and I think the album before it, “Nimby,” ranks among the band's best.

But I was talking about 2008.

Avri outside a train station in Germany, 2008.

In 2008, when the band announced their farewell tour, I was in a decent place in my life. I'd been working for the same company for over a year, making a good wage, and life felt pretty stable. I was talking with my friend Avri, lamenting how I was never going to get a chance to see the band live. I remember the moment well, as he was giving me a lift home in his car, and there was a moment, a long moment, before he said to me “Well, we could just go to Germany.” And it was another, far longer moment before I replied, “We could just go to Germany.”

As it turned out, Avri had friends living in Berlin, so the plan was set into motion. We were going to go and spend a week in Germany, and in the middle of it, we would drive down to Hanover and see the band in their hometown at a show on their farewell tour. Avri would fly back after the week, and I was going to extend my vacation by another week, going to London afterwards. I'd always wanted to see London.

We started to put things together for the trip, and an idea occurred to me. I'm not usually one to request a song, but I figured, fuck it, I was traveling half way across the world for this show. It wouldn't hurt to ask. So I wrote up an email to the band, telling them how far I was traveling, how long I'd loved their music, and if it was okay for me to request a song. It was a shot in the dark, but the band had email addresses for each of the band members on their website, so why not, right? I asked them to play “Haunted Head & Heart,” my favorite Fury In the Slaughterhouse song, off the German version of “Mono.” The song was never released stateside.

A few days later, I got an email from Christof, the band's lead guitarist, telling me that I didn't need to worry about buying tickets to the show – I was on the guest list, and I could come back and meet them after the show for drinks. It was a short little email, but I was over the moon about it.

A bit after that, I got another email, this time from Thorsten, who also plays guitar and is Kai's younger brother. I didn't know it at the time, but he also wrote “Haunted Head & Heart” and sings it as well. He wrote a much longer email, detailing how excited he was that their music had stuck so deeply in someone across the world, and asked if I wanted to come to the very last show in Hanover.

Fury, 2008.

As it turned out, the final show was within the window of time I'd set aside for London. So I bought a second set of plane tickets, and the plan for trip changed. Instead of a week in Germany and a week in London, it turned into a week in Germany, five days in London, then a flight back to Germany, the final Fury In The Slaughterhouse show, the afterparty, a flight back to London, then flying back to the states.

Between booking the tickets and heading to Germany, the company I was working for went through a massive round of layoffs, terminating a third of their employees on one day, myself included. Of course, I had already booked the tickets, so adventure ho, even if there was no work to come back to.

The first of the two shows, we were late for, and I do mean late. We missed both opening acts and the first few songs of Fury's set. I was a bit pissed by that, but we caught the back half of “Radio Orchid” and as the set continued, I grew more and more ecstatic, even as the rain started to pour down. And midway through the show, the band asked if I was in the audience, and I shouted out as loud as I could. Thorsten then told the crowd (in German) that I'd flown thousands of kilometers to see the band that night, and that made me the biggest Fury fan outside of Germany.

Kai, me and Thorsten, 2008.

All the rain had made my backstage pass sticker slip off so I had to flash my passport to get them to let me into the backstage area, but Avri and I did get in and I spent a little bit of time talking with Thorsten. I wish I had spent more time talking with them, but Avri and I were sort of at the mercy of a our hosts, and we had to drive back to Berlin, which was a couple hour drive. On top of that, I was a little bit starstruck.

Less than a week later, I flew back from London to Hanover, where I had a different host. See, I'd sent another email when I'd decided to do the final show – to Nils. Sure enough, Nils was still a fan, so he met up with me at Hanover airport, took me to lunch, and then we went to the final Fury In The Slaughterhouse show. I got my copy of the “Brilliant Thieves” CD book signed by the entire band at the show, but everyone was having such a great party, I didn't want to bother anyone. At around 2 a.m., we left the afterparty and made our way to Hanover airport, where I caught a 6 a.m. flight to London, and then flew out of London a little after noon to head back to the states.

Nils, Thorsten, me, 2008.

I have recordings of those shows, so I can listen to them any time, as well as a t-shirt from the tour that I've worn pretty much once a month since then, although I forgot to pick up a poster from the show, to my own annoyance. We'll double back to that later.

In another lifetime, that might be the end of the story. And it's a pretty good one, right? Music fan flies to the other side of the world to see favorite band play live, gets to meet them after the show, and has the story to tell for the rest of his days. But our story doesn't end there...

----------

I'll be continuing this whole thing in sections, so expect the next part in a few days.

Battle Damage

Battle Damage

By Cliff Hicks

It may not be the most overly complicated form of suicide ever committed, but I'll wager it's damn close. Call it the Rube Goldberg of magical euthanasia. All the pieces are laid out, all the plans set.

All that's left is to actually do the deed.

The warding circle is drawn. Everything I'm going to let loose needs to stay in. Until someone comes and claims it, naturally. And someone will come. Someone always comes when there's something to be gained, and rarely otherwise.

The location is chosen. Down in the sewers, a nook undiscovered by the elements or travelers. Not as pristine a place to die as I would have liked, but it'll have to do. I'd have preferred somewhere sunny, but I'm dying in inches, and I'm sick of it.

All that's left is to say the incantation, to get the whole thing rolling. The final sentence I'll ever utter in my life. It's only a few words, a handful of ancient forgotten words that'll cut me loose of this, let me have peace, at long last, peace.

I step into the circle, taking care not to break any of the lines, and for a moment, one singular moment, I wonder whether or not I should do this. I decide to leave it up to chance. I reach into my pocket and fish out the coin, the last thing Yoshi gave me before, well, before she stopped being Yoshi.

It's a tiny gold disc, nothing much remarkable about it. Some low level enchantment on it, but nothing dangerous. It's got two sides, which is all that matters, a phoenix on one side, a dual-faced god on the other.

I perch the coin atop of my thumb and flick it into the air. A god to take me away from all of this, to die; a phoenix to tell me to be reborn. Both options feel a whole hell of a lot like losing. At the apex of its arc, I snap my hand up and grab the coin and slap it down atop of the back of my other hand.

“Whoa there,” I hear a voice say to me before I can lift my hand up to reveal my fate. “That had better not be what it looks like it is.”

I sigh, lifting wearied brown eyes to look over at the mage standing across from me now. She couldn't have waited five damn minutes? “You're early. You can't get what you want until I'm dead, so mind easing off and letting me settle this?”

“You're... you're Emilio, aren't you? Youngest of the Survivor Seven?” she says. She's a bit younger than me, and I barely look out of high school, but looks don't mean much in my line of work. Her ponytail is a deep shade of faded emerald, her outfit mostly made of leather and brass, and she's on edge. “Thanks for saving, well, everything about a week ago. But I have to ask – you do know what that circle's meant for, right?”

I can't help but have a tiny gallows laugh. “I do. And there isn't any Survivor Seven any more. There's just me.” A week ago, the Seven had been faced with an impossible task, a breach from one of the Infernal Realms. We pushed it back as best as we could, but to close the breach, a sacrifice had to be made.

I'd been part of the Seven less than two years, and now I was all that was left. From Seven to One.

“That particular warding circle's pretty complex,” she said to me. “It looks like you built it to withstand a lot from the inside, but not a whole lot from the out.”

I sighed, rubbing my thumb along my wrist, desperate to lift my hand up and look at the coin's results. “That's sort of the point. I'm carrying around the full energy of the Seven in me right now, and I can't keep that up.”

She whistled a low single note, somewhere between admiration and a little bit of fear. “You want to tell me what happened?”

“It took six. Six souls to open the gate, six souls to close it. So the seven of us drew blind stones from a bag, and we didn't know who was going to live, right up until the end.” I inhaled a long breath, my fingertips curling around the top of my hand, squeezing down on it a bit more. “I wish I hadn't drawn the one survivor's stone. They were all better magicians than me, smarter, wiser, more capable of handling this. Instead I'm the one left standing. But being the survivor means all that power from the others is infused in me. It's burning me up, cutting its way through me. The others are gone, and I'm just battle damage, a mess of scars barely able to stand. I mean, Christ, look at me. My hands are shaking. They haven't stopped shaking all week.”

She raises one of her hands, extending it towards me. “You're still in shock.”

“The hell would you know about shock?” I snarl.

“More than you'd think. You don't know who I am, do you?”

I shake my head. “Sorry. Like you said, I'm pretty new at this.”

She smiles, trying to put me at ease. “Yeah, well, me too, but we all get reputations pretty quick. They call me The Reconstructionist. I rebuild things, repair them, fix them.”

The hand that the coin is on the back of curls into a fist before I catch myself doing it and unclench. “Some things can't get fixed.”

“Your friend Anatoly used to say that too. And I'll tell you what I told him – what you can't fix, you just rebuild instead.”

“God!” I sputter. “If only it was that goddamn simple! I'm burning up. I'm not a candle burning at both ends, I'm engulfed in the damn flames. For seven days, I've searched, trying to find some notes, some spell that will ease this tempest trapped inside of me, and this... this is all I can come up with.”

“Which is... what? Trap all the raw power in the circle and then off yourself? There are better ways out of your mess than that.”

“And if I was an older mage, a smarter mage, I'd know them! I'd know who in our shitty line of work I could trust to help me solve the problem, but I'm no ancient sorcerer. I'm barely used to getting three meals a day at this point! So why don't you back off a bit, give me five minutes to do this, and then you can take all this power for yourself and you can deal with it?” There's a weariness in my voice I didn't suspect I was capable of, not any more. But right now, I feel like that poor, lonely homeless kid on the streets of Barcelona all over again. Aimless, unfocused, afraid and fragile, exactly where I was when Yoshi found me twenty months ago.

“I don't think that's what you really want. It might feel like it right now, but I think deep down you know better,” she says, as she's walking around the circle. It means I have to keep turning to keep my eyes on her. I half suspect she's going to try and break a line so I don't go through with it.

“I... I can't,” I exhale. “I know the rest of the Seven would want me to keep going, but I can't. I just can't. I'm coming apart at the seams. I've barely eaten, I'm crying all the goddamn time. They even have a term for it – survivor's guilt.”

She nods, just a tiny shift of her head. “It's a specific subsection of post-traumatic stress disorder. I know. But you know you didn't cause this, right? You're not to blame for living.”

“Again, you're arguing rationality with emotion,” I grumble. “How did you even find me, anyway?” The beacon spell isn't supposed to go off until I cut all the power loose inside of the circle, and I know it didn't go off early. My mind's a mess, but my spellwork is still solid.

“The twinning coin,” she says, pointing to my hand that still covers it. “It's part of a pair, a summoning talisman between me and Yoshi, only meant to be used in extreme emergencies, although I think this qualifies. Did she give it to you?”

“Yeah, she...” Dammit. I close my fist around the coin and then throw it against the sewer wall as hard as I can, yelling out, and I feel the brickwork shake a little, as the magic inside of me ripples out like a tiny earthquake. I see her jump a little bit in response to the shockwave of magic that bends through her for a moment, and after it's passed, I snort in a heavy breath before I can speak again. “Fixed.”

“What?”

“She fixed it. Yoshi rigged the survivor's stones, made sure to give me the one unsacrified. She... she rigged it so I would live.”

She smiles, sage and calm. “And she gave you the coin, so it would bring me... to you. So I could help you. She wanted me to help you rebuild.”

“There's only scars left. Not even a foundation on which to put something new.”

She walks away from me for a moment, far enough to pick up the coin, tucking it into her pocket. “Only one way to find out, right? Tell you what – let me give it a try and if I fail, then you can get back to whatever mad plan you had.”

“One try.”

She nods at me again, walking up to me. “She didn't have time to give you the lesson you needed, because if she did, then you'd have known she fixed the draw. But she told me I was going to need to know this one day, so why don't you listen while I'm making a few changes here.” She kneels down and starts to add additional lines to the circle, changing the spellwork.

“Nice of her to tell you and not me.”

“Listen,” she says, added a few extra curls and curves before standing up, directly in front of me. “It's called the Survivor Seven because it, as a group, always exists. There's always someone left to carry on, to keep going, to rebuild.”

“Why weren't you in the group instead of me?”

“I'm even newer to this than you are. But you aren't alone. Here, take my hand,” she says, holding a hand out to me. I look at it for a moment, then shrug and take it.

As soon as our skin touches, her fingers close firmly on my hand and hold it, as she steps into the circle. She leans in and kisses me, her lips to mine for just a moment, a brief instant, but in that moment, I can feel some of the pressure ease off, some of that power fade, no, shift, from me into her. “What...”

“Yoshi also told me she had this great guy she wanted to set me up with. A little headstrong, too proud to ask for help. Well, you're getting help whether you like it or not.” She smiles, her face close to mine. “You just need to lighten the load. No one person can handle the magic of seven. You're not the Lone Survivor any more. Now there's two of us. We just need to find five more...”

“Are you sure?”

“Too late for that now. I couldn't let go of your hand even if I wanted to until we've split that magic you're carrying in half. Could be hours.”

“...thanks.”

“Zelda. I'm Zelda. Your new partner.”

Buckethead - Electric Sea - 2012

I feel a little bit bad getting you started on Buckethead, simply because the man redefines the word "prolific." How can I tell? "Electric Sea" is his thirty-fifth album. I mean, seriously, the man must be recording all the time. That said, you'll probably end up finding you like a branch of Buckethead's material and are significantly less interested in another.

I'm the same way - I love about a third of Buckethead's stuff, I can go either way with a third of it and a third of it only appeals to me when I'm in a very, very specific mood.

The Buckethead stuff that I think appeals to the widest swath of people is, by my reckoning, the following records: "Electric Tears," "Population Override," "A Real Diamond In The Rough," "Shadows Between The Sky," "Captain EO's Voyage" and "Electric Sea." These albums are also generally the least "heavy."

See, here's the thing about Buckethead - the guy is a guitar genius, and he experiments a lot. So there's no guarantee from album to album that anything will sound even vaguely the same. Sometimes he's doing acoustic soundscapes. Sometimes he's doing thrasher metal. Sometimes he's doing wobbly funk guitar. Sometimes he plays in Guns'n'Roses. He can literally do anything he wants to with a guitar. I saw him live a few years back in Santa Cruz and it was a crazy show, and he wandered through a dozen different styles during that concert.

"Electric Sea" is a good jumping on point - with the Enrico Morricone-esque "El Indio," the soft rain-like acoustic dances of "Beyond The Knowing," to the relaxed oceanside sunset of the title track. You'll get a good idea of the kinds of things that Buckethead can do when he's in that kind of mood. If you find it appeals to you, follow my list and you should get a lot more stuff you'll love. If you like what you hear, but you want more thrashy, fretboard lightning, you can explore the long "Bucketheadland" and find a lot more metal-type stuff there, but again, you'll find his range of metal is as broad and varied as the rest of his stuff. ("It's Alive" is sort of a great sampler platter of most of the styles you'll find represented, so maybe start there.)

Catherine Wheel - Ferment - 1992

Catherine Wheel's song "Black Metallic" was a shot in the arm that made me start listening to music in an entirely new light.

This is another one of those "120 Minutes" discoveries, but man, "Black Metallic" was a song that absolutely haunted me. I remember listening to in on a Monday afternoon after school, and then going out to a Homer's Music (Nebraska's mini music chain) to pick up a copy of the album it was on, "Ferment," right after school on Tuesday.

"Ferment" is one of the albums I've bought the most over the years - a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my truck in 1997, a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my car in 1999, a copy was in the collection of CDs I had stolen from my car in 2002 and the album was reissued in 2010 with a bunch of new material. So I've given Catherine Wheel quite a bit of money for this album, and each and every time it's been absolutely worth it.

"Ferment" is gothic. It's not goth, but it's got a certain weightiness to it, a density you don't find on a lot of music. The very first song on the album, "Texture," is as advertised. You can practically feel the sheets of guitar work, shimmering like glittering steel in moonlight. This sort of sets the stage for what you're going to get on the album, something best listened to at night if you ask me. It's full of hefty melodies and epic sounds. They aren't quite shoegaze, but you can hear they aren't that far from it. The band didn't like being lumped into the shoegaze genre, but it's easy to see why a lot of critics lumped them into the field - the guitars are truly epic, and dwarf most of the other sounds. But Rob Dickinson's voice is just too prominent for them to be pure shoegaze, and the band constructs songs a bit more traditionally than often falls into the shoegaze wheelhouse.

On later albums, the band would move away from this sort of cathedral-of-guitar field and into a bit more traditional britpop/rock, which was a shame. It's not to say the latter albums aren't excellent, because they are, but "Ferment" (and the follow-up "Chrome") were moments that have yet to be replicated or matched. The band split up in 2000, and none of the projects they've taken up since then have been quite as remarkable as these, although Rob Dickinson's "Fresh Wine For The Horses" contains a number of good-to-great songs (and the special edition also includes a second disc of him doing a number of songs from his back catalog, including some of the best of Catherine Wheel, acoustically...)

There's nothing I can do to actually top hearing "Black Metallic" for the first time, so take seven-and-a-half minutes of your day and hear one of the most glorious epics ever released as a single... Aw man, the video's the short version, with only four and a half minutes...


Score! Here's them doing the song live on "120 Minutes" at the full length with a bit to grow on! Neither version is as perfect as the seven minute and twenty seconds you'll get on the album, but you can try each and see what connects best with you... Also, as I write this, "Ferment" is SIX BUCKS on iTunes... you're practically stealing it at that point. No reason you shouldn't get a copy...

The Losers - 2003-206

I was trying to find something big but not TOO big to write about this week, and then it dawned on me - I could write about "The Losers" by Andy Diggle and Jock, which most of you have probably never heard about.

"The Losers" ran for 32 issues at Vertigo, its intended length. (For some strange reason, people often think the book got cancelled, even though the story ends exactly where it needs to...) It's collected in 5 slim trade paperbacks or 2 larger trade paperbacks, to tie in with the release of the movie, that wasn't terrible, but wasn't amazing either, despite a marvelous cast, but more on that in a bit.

It's a classic sort of revenge tale, with a group of spec ops troops getting revenge on their CIA handler who fucked them, but it's also got a lot of other big political elements that were relevant at the time, and a lot of which are still relevant now, including "the war on terror," race relations in the US, the CIA's involvement in global politics and a bunch of other stuff.

This is the book that put Andy Diggle on the scene for me as a writer, and I've mostly followed his writing career since this, although he's certainly one of the more up-and-down writers I tend to follow. Some of his projects have absolutely been amazing (such as his run on Hellblazer or his Green Arrow: Year One, a lot of which provided the foundation for the "Arrow" TV show) and some of them, well, some of them have not (*coughcough* AdamStrange *coughcough*). Mostly, though, Diggle's known for writing great dialogue and keeping stories spinning.

Jock's art, however, is certainly an acquired taste. I very much enjoy Jock's angular, almost chunky, style, because it usually fits for the type of material he's working on. It's noir-ish, and Jock has a very excellent grasp of how to darken in a scene, how to use lighting and how to give striking perspectives, but some people think his artwork is a little too raw for their liking, and I can understand that. Like I said, he's not an artist for everyone, but I dig him.

That's Jensen with the glasses..

"The Losers" is a fun tale in the tradition of "The Dirty Dozen," and the team of agents is all sorts of crazy. The plot takes a number of twists (and the last arc is maaaaaybe a bit bigger than some people can handle, a little too world super-villain and not enough grounded reality) and you're always going to be guessing where it's going to go next. The story is a complete package, though, so you'll have a nice resolved ending and feel like you've been on a big journey over the course of it. You can get the whole thing in "Book One" and "Book Two" on Amazon for your Kindle for $25, or in paper for $35 or so.

Now, about the movie... So here's the deal. It's got a lot of actors I really like in it - Idris Elba, Zoe Saldana, Jeffery Dean Morgan and Chris Evans (who basically steals the show in most of his scenes, and put him on the map for me, which made me psyched when he was announced as Captain America...) but it's... a good part of it's just a mess. The film is at its best when it's adhering closely to the source material, which means the helicopter bit at the beginning, Evans in the skyrise with the finger gun, the bits about the cash... but despite all of these amazing things they got right, oh my god what the living fuck is Jason Patric doing? Patric isn't a bad actor, but he's not even in the same movie. It's like the main cast gets they're doing "The Dirty Dozen" and Patric is convinced he's in "Batman & Robin"... you know, the one even Clooney is ashamed of. Also, the movie sticks to mostly the first act or two of the books, and the further it veers from the source material, the more it falls apart. If you're interested, read the books FIRST and then go back and watch the movie so you can enjoy the bits that are translated extremely well from the book (and to watch Evans actually dominate the role of Jensen) and then you can sort of let the rest of the stuff slide off your back...

Here's the trailer, to whet your whistle. Go buy the two books, even if the last act can get a bit operatic. You'll love them. I know I did.

Frank Turner - Tape Deck Heart - 2013

I guess I was late showing up to the "Frank Turner is cool" party, but Frank Turner is cool.

Frank Turner started as the frontman for a hardcore band, but found that after a while, he just wanted a change of pace, so he put out an album of songs like a troubadour - him and his acoustic guitar talking about life after hardcore. And damned if it hasn't been great stuff.

Some of the earlier albums were a bit shaky, sometimes getting too lost in his balladeering, but "Tape Deck Heart" is Frank's fifth album, and it's lock-solid from start to finish, mostly because it's gotten the balance down between bitter bluesy tracks and more upbeat catchy swinging songs. Frank's also willing to pick up the occasional electric and let it dance among the sounds, but doesn't ever let it overwhelm anything.

In many ways, Frank Turner's filling the space that Dashboard Confessional seems to have left - someone talking about their own life with a brutal bit of clarity, sometimes to their own detriment. Songs like "Good & Gone" include lyrics like "So fuck you Hollywood / For raising us on dreams of happy endings / In postcards of the prom kings and the prom queens / For teaching us that love was free and easy" and you can tell Turner's had a rough go at life from time to time, but he's right, and it's understandable, how frustrating life can be in comparison to the views of Hollywood.

Then you have a song like "Tattoos," where he talks about his love of tattoos and what they say about him: "Some people have one and  / Some have one that they're ashamed of  / Most people think that we're fools / Some people don't get it and / Some people don't care /And some of us we have tattoos..."

For me, though, the song on the album that really brings it all home is "We Shall Not Overcome," the anthem of, well, someone just like me: "We're all awkward understudies wearing comfortable shoes getting comfortable with doing it wrong / Missed the dress rehearsals and we had to rush a drink before the show but now it's show time and we're singing our song! /Because the bands I like, they don't sell too many records / And the girls I like, they don't kiss too many boys / Books I read will never be best sellers, yeah / But come on fellas at least we made our choice..."

The single that caught everyone's attention, though, was "Polaroid Picture" and I'll leave you with that...

Kavinsky - Outrun - 2013

It'll be a short couple of days, as I've got a concert tonight, and I've been making significant progress on a writing project I've been working on, so I want to keep my forward motion on that. That said, I do want to give you music to listen to. So today, I give you Kavinsky.

Kavinsky doesn't work fast, having only put out one album and a handful of EPs since starting making music almost ten years ago, but what he does make is incredible stuff.

His style is electronic music that's heavily influenced by early 1980s soundtracks and the synth-pop of the same era. It's for people who like Daft Punk and Justice, although Kavinsky definitely has a sound that is all his own. It tends to shift back and forth between sleek/fast and slow/slinky.

His first album, "Outrun," came out about a year ago, and is full of all sorts of tracks that will burrow their way into your ear and stick around forever. Here's "Protovision," one of the singles from the album.

VHS Or Beta - Diamonds And Death - 2011

VHS Or Beta are a band clearly out of time. One quick listen and you'll be immediately greeted with sounds that are clearly more influenced by disco, house and the electronic scene of the early 1980s than anything you'd normally hear today.

They have a dance-y feel to them, but it's seemed like they've been an underground band for a long time, much to my sadness. I suppose it's hard because it's difficult to hang a hook on their tracks. The lyrics aren't catchy and don't often draw you in, so on first impression, they can come across as a less memorable Duran Duran, but the instrumentation is so good, the longer you listen to it, the more it works its way into your brain. The songs are perfect for grooving to, and they're absolutely spot on for a warm summer evening.

"Diamonds And Death" is their third album, and probably their most accessible, particularly the catchy "I Found A Reason," but "Breaking Bones" actually got a video, so I'll leave you with that.