It was spring of 2001 and I was spending a good chunk of my time venturing into the uncharted territories of my home studio while also revisiting my love of the trip hop and industrial genres. "World Gone Mad" developed in this period from a dream-like state of studio work lucidity.
I remember wanting to stretch the limits of my imagination for this song once the bass line appeared, so I rummaged through one of my older notebooks and found a written piece that dated back to 1996 entitled, "Worlds of Farce." I tweaked some of the lines from that piece over and over until I had given a lyrical match to the song's encompassing tone. In a sense, a hybrid was created from two distinct forms in the process.
I wanted to deepen and darken the mood of the song further by taking more of a dissonant approach to the melodic crafting of the arrangement. In this way, the creation of "World Gone Mad" allowed me to push back my own borders of artistic sensibility. By doing so, I freed myself from the confines of self-imposed guidelines and took a step further from previous experiments such as "Flying Blind" and "Tick Tock."
Like the other cuts that made it onto "High Noon," Chris and I had a strong feeling about "World" even in the early stages of the record's production. We felt the song would give us a chance to show a different and important side of our expression and identity as a band. This led us to take special care to sculpt a re-visualization of the song that would preserve the feel and integrity present in the original version. We transformed the choruses into emotional explosions by making them as big and powerful as possible. The result gave "World" an entirely new impact through the song's relationship between tension and release. |
