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"song 47 was the very first song written after the Glass Prison sessions. Anyone who has heard that album knows that that part of Mantra's life was more about us bridging the gap between what I was writing (bad poppy alt. rock) and what we wanted to play (halfway decent alt. metal) than anything else. We played a show in Berlin, the infamous and ill-fated "Stereo Stock", about three weeks after we recorded the album, where everything pretty much came to a head about the band. A long story short, we weren't the coolest-sounding band in the room (or gazeebo, for that matter...), and certain band members took a rather misguided exception to that. So after having gone to Ozzfest that year (2001, the Year of the Nu-Metal) and seen Mudvayne, nonpoint, and Taproot, I knew what dynamic heavy music could do. I parked my half-stack in my bedroom and wrote angry rock for about a week until I came up with what would eventually become the basis for 'Whispered Scream', 'Demise of Solace', and 'song 47'. We ended up debuting 'Scream' and 'song' at our December 8th show, and it suddenly all made sense to the three of us. The way the crowd reacted is one of the greatest memories of my life. For 'song' in particular, we had a hell of a mosh pit going, including the legendary (at least locally) injury. Good times, that band... but if I had to pick a point in time where Mantra stopped being 'Mantra' and started being the very beginnings of 'Braintree', I'd have to say December 8th was it. The beginning of the end pretty much.
With Braintree, however, 'song' looks pretty different. I outfitted a guitar for a pretty unique quasi-baritone tuning that I came up with when I was living in Somerville, and the 'song' riff ended up being the perfect vehicle for that tuning. Since then it's become a lot more melodic, a lot less repetitive, and a shitload heavier. It's the ballsiest thing I've written so far, and I hope we can trot it out on stage at some point, it'll be fun to see what it can do live in the new form."
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