Once upon a time I wrote a sort of self-dedicated "hey self, be better" anthem. The year was 2008. The anthem in question was called Shadoweaver. 

A lot of late teenage angst went into this track, ha. It was essentially borne of a series of introspective realizations that I'd fucked up and gravely disappointed some of the closest humans around me through careless and selfish disregard of their feelings. As a result, the lyrical themes depict myself as transforming into a sort of predatory demon, exiled to exist in obscurity (something something Beauty and the Beast?). In the grand scheme of things, the actions that'd spurred said disappointments were fairly inconsequential, but it all felt immensely significant at the time. I've always been my own worst critic.

Anyway, years later, it's still probably one of the best melodic metal compositions I've ever pieced together, and easily one of my favorite ones to play. More recently, I'd attempted to render an acoustic transmutation of it for funsies, which turned out surprisingly well... and so I committed it to mic. See, the trickiest thing about doing acoustic covers of metal tracks is converting the somewhat atonal growly vocals into the clean melodic sort. For this particular piece, I'd sort of cheated by following the melody of the guitar strums, with only the occasional melodic deviation, for flair (or whatever). My singing talents are dodgy at best, so it defs took a fair amount of work to get to the end result... which I am pleased with, so there's that. The varying dynamic swells sound very haunting, which serves the intention behind the track perfectly, I think.

Contrary to my usual approach to song production (typically around 60-80 tracks of percussive and instrumental layers, plus then some), it was pretty novel to piece together something relatively minimalistic (two stereo-miked acoustic guitars -- lead and rhythm, plus the lone vocal track). I'd envisioned the arrangement to be somewhat intimate, and tried to make the mix represent the sort of sensation one might experience in front of a small stage at a tiny blues club (the Blue Gator in Kelowna comes to mind... a former red-ale-fueled stomping ground). So hopefully the track sort of translates that. 

All in all, turned out pree neat. I kinda like it.