Seriously! I'm still just using this space for notating the songs that are up there in that player. So yeah...Wayne's Johnson... "Wayne's Johnson" was originally just something that popped into my head one day as a fun title for a country instrumental. (you know, a play on "John Wayne") I think I must've imagined that Skerik would be likely to use a name like this. My initial goal was just to remember the name when I inevitably stumbled upon a country riff that was heavy-handed enough that it inspired me to flesh it out into a western soundscape. But then, the unthinkable happened. The title was just too powerful. Hellishly, lyrics started appearing in my head. "Hah hah, that's kinda funny, I like how that works both ways" I would think... "but man that's too low-brow even for me". None of my attempts at discretion or taste had any effect though. Within a couple of weeks, the demon had left me with a complete (though potentially catastrophically embarrassing) set of lyrics.

It started as a simple guitar-and-voice tune, but really ached to be something a little bigger, so I started to multitrack it -- building first from MIDI and then gradually replacing and amplifying with dumbek, cajon, charango, bass-box, slide-guitar, backup-vocals, etc..., etc... Still, there were a couple of sections that really seemed to call for a full drum-kit, and since I really hadn't been able to get Adrian to fit any tracking into his schedule, it seemed like the world might be mercifully saved from ever hearing the demon's work. Without the kit, It just kinda lost momentum across all of those sections. But Wayne just wouldn't die! Eventually, I sampled some of Adrian's drums from the "BaileyRog" multitrack (and one splash from Paul Turner) and went to work constructing the drum-lines for the later sections one MIDI-event at a time. Suddenly, the demonic flame leapt back to life. What was previously sprawling and off-putting was now complicated and hard-rocking! I never would've taken so many different approaches to the percussion in a single song if I hadn't thought it would mostly get replaced by a drummer, but wow! For me, it seems to allow the continual re-birth of the simple structure of the verses. ...eroding the channel for the many flavors of magic broth that stream through it.