Warpriest “The Tarnished Crown” Song Breakdown

August 13th is the one year anniversary of the release of Warpriest’s “Dark Ages”. All week I am going to be doing a series of videos talking about the inspiration behind the songs. Today, it is about the song, “The Tarnished Crown”. You can view the video on YouTube, or on your favorite social media site.

Since it is the one year anniversary, we are doing a give away of the Dark Ages CD and some Warpriest swag. All you have to do to enter, is comment on one of the videos on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. After all the videos are posted, a winner will be selected at random.

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So today we’re going to talk about the second song off of Warpriest’s “Dark Ages” album that released one year ago. This song is called “The Tarnished Crown”, and this is probably one of my favorite songs off of the album. Originally, the working title was “The Troll”, and it was recorded in March of 2021. I had maybe a couple of songs already set up for the album, old songs that I had sitting there, maybe about four or five. I decided that I needed to have a few other songs. I came across the song ”Virtual Death” off of Black Sabbath’s “Cross Purposes” album. I had never heard it before and I really liked the bass intro, so I kind of nicked that. And there’s a little bit of “Sign of the Southern Cross” in there, specifically with the drums and a little bit of the keyboard sound. I really liked what Vinny Appice was doing on that album. Once I wrote the song and had the lyrics and everything done, I gave it to my wife Elis, and let her come up with the vocal melody. I gave her a blueprint of some things that I was going for: harmonies on the “Virtual Death” song, and also I gave her a little bit of Alice and Chains, and tried to get that thick vocal harmony. I think she did an awesome job with it! I was going to let her sing the chorus of the song. But I didn’t like the way she was doing this little like “bluesy” kind of accent to the song, and I wanted to have a little bit more bite, so I did the chorus, and I think we ended up, I guess you could say it’s a “duet”, and we’re like the Sonny and Cher of doom. Also, the little double time solo at the end was just a happy accident that I came up with, and I love the little vibe that it gives to the song and the change in it.

The inspiration for the song came from an article that I had read on Gnosticism. It comes from the Greek word “gnosis”, which means to know or to have insight, and sometimes it’s viewed as a “secret knowledge”. So I took this theme, also with … seemed like a recent development where I was seeing a lot of conspiracy theories online, and people really buying into these things. I just wrote the song with my experience with a lot of these people, where they seem to bring together a lot of information and piece together things that are like, puzzles that don’t exist, but they fit together somehow in their mind. I feel like sometimes in this day and age, it’s just a distraction from the real issues that we face on a day to day basis. So I wrote this song talking about that. Just a reminder that if you comment under this video, that you will be entered to win a free copy of the “Dark Ages”, album, which will be at the end of the series of these videos will be randomly drawn. So if you haven’t already, like and subscribe, as I’m always updating you with information like this. And pretty soon we’re looking at having the third album come out. Talk to you later.