Jordan's Introduction:
Hello, and welcome to The Mythology of Empathy’s album booklet! You can consider these the liner notes. The nonfiction ones, I mean. (I also recommend reading the fictional ones too! They’re part of the experience.)

It’s worth explaining what, exactly, the Sunsetters are: Fiction. I write stories, and in my stories I like to sort of intertwine words and music, but there are these bullshit things called “copyrights” in this world, so over time I figured I could just pretend my words are based on musical things. For this purpose, I invented a rock band who exist in most of my works in some form or other, a rock band my characters can be fans of and quote lyrics from and whatever else is necessary. A good friend of mine, Jay, whipped up some album covers for this band, and I even dabbled in really dumb sample music (as in, ripped from samples) just to illustrate the point. For a long time, that is all that the Sunsetters were: A kinda cool idea, a fictional “underground 2000s prog metal band” that wrote songs about the dark gods I liked to explore.

Enter the friend, the myth, the legend.

Lindsay is much more musically inclined than I am, and at the time she was considerably more inclined than I was. She liked my stories, and she liked the idea of these Sunsetters guys, and she was a bored high school senior, so she did what any rational-thinking human would do: She decided to write literally the entire Sunsetters discography.
At first, I helped tangentially. I did write “The Last Sunset” pretty early on, and amazingly the song hasn’t changed much since my original demo. I also had a demo for “Perfection” at one point. But most of what I did was just.. look at Lindsay’s stuff and wonder what it would sound like if performed by a live band; she did the bulk of the work. Then one day, we discovered that MuseScore, our writing software, has a playback function. And a versatile export function. And surprisingly customizable presets. There was actually a lot that MuseScore could do. And I, having only a clarinet and a Rock Band 3 keyboard to my name, could actually experiment with music.

The rest, while not history, is boring and exactly what you’d expect: We worked a lot, editing single notes sometimes, entire sections other times, playing with presets and volume levels and panning, experimenting with post-processing (deciding not to go for any for this debut), testing metadata, compiling songs again and again and again, compressing them, brainstorming, working on other albums and then coming back again and again and again, until eventually one day we just kinda... reached an end point.

Mythology took literally years to make, then it took years to write a version 2 of, and then it took even more years as we brought the content to a version 3 that matches the quality of the next two Sunsetters albums we did. I think it’s ready now. God, I hope so. (I helped a lot more this time.)

It’s meant to be a “classic underground 2000s metal album and also a debut album.” The final product tries to reflect, at least, what I would have considered a really good (debut) album of that era.

Welcome to the new music industry, folks. Welcome to the new fiction. Gone is the analog sound, gone is the analog production process, gone are the analog people. We can make music, we can make an entire band’s career, without actually making the band. We can make record companies without making the record companies. It’s all emulation, embraced. Somehow I find this the most EAT of a concept you can get.

Lindsay's Introduction:
It’s been seven years since I started writing what would become The Mythology of Empathy, and let me tell you I never expected it to turn out this good. When I started doing this, I knew nothing about music theory, songcrafting, how to actually play bass, anything that one would need to be able to write good prog. The one thing I did have was dear ol’ MuseScore version 1, and also a tonne of free time. And as it turned out, not knowing how to write music or how guitars work ended up being helpful; because I wasn’t restrained by reality, I could write literally anything, no matter how impossible it would be to actually play in real life, and as long as it sounded good, it could be used.

Probably the first thing that listeners will notice in this release is that there are now vocal lines, something that was absent from the previous version. Vocals were something that neither Jordan nor I really knew how to do when we were writing this album back in the day, and only by Summer Sucks did Jordan (and not me; all the vocal lines were Jordan on this release) really give vocals a shot, and they turned out real good on both albums.

It took a lot of work, but the first release of Mythology turned out pretty good. Then the rerelease a year later turned out even better. And now this second rerelease has turned out even better than the first one.

Also, as a quick side note, in the time between this release and the previous release of Mythology, I trans’d my gender and took a new name, so we’re clear.

Jordan:
I always get this confused with the other punk song, which is now the opener to Summer Sucks. I remember, the moment I heard this one, I absolutely loved it. It’s short, it’s catchy, it’s badass, it’s fast, it’s to-the-point. The lyrics, I was bored in the shop one day and wrote a first draft of these along with “Burning Books.” These lyrics are loosely based on James Joyce’s short story “Counterparts,” which for some reason was the only thing I could think of when looking at Quinn’s gorgeous album cover.

For this “version 3” of the album, all I really did on this song was add vocal lines to correspond with the lyrics. Turns out they work fine.

Worth mentioning: We were originally gonna have, like, the Sunsetters start off with an EP called Drowning Under the Influence, which would have had demos of some Mythology tracks and also “Interpolation of Memory” (which is a poem and not an actual song at the moment-- that is why we haven’t done anything with it). Quinn’s cover was actually done for this EP and then reworked for the album. Because one debut is enough!

Lindsay:
This was originally my second attempt at writing ‘Summer Sucks’, my take on writing a punk song, and infinitely better than the first attempt. After Jordan and I reworked the tracklist for Mythology, we decided that this would work as a good album opener, so it became ‘Drowning’. The instrumental came together in, like, half an hour, while the lyrics went through a number of drafts before completion. I like how the title kind of foreshadows both ‘Rise of Her Rain’ and We Excavate; don’t remember if that was intentional or not, but I feel like it probably was.

Jordan:
The first draft of this was, like, twice as long. Most sections repeated a lot more. One day I basically asked Lindsay if I could prune it, and we wound up really liking the end result. I also added little touches here and there to emphasize the melodies and rhythms a bit more, and the end section was my creation too. Came from a ditty I made in GarageBand for Topography Genera, a ditty called “The Blood of the Queen.” Was basically that ending melody but way too long and with a silly drum beat. I do not miss the GarageBand days.

Don’t ask me what the lyrics are supposed to mean. I don’t know. I think I had something in mind when I wrote them? I had clearly been reading Pale Fire; there are some blatant parallels in some of the, like, cadences and shit. Whenever I deconstruct the lyrics in order to figure out what the hell I was trying to say, it reads as a very philosophical piece. I guess it’s nice to think the Sunsetters dabbled in philosophy even early on.

Lindsay:
The first Sunsetters/Blind Man’s Book song. I started with the drum line, ‘cause I had only been playing bass for a few months and didn’t really know how to write sheet music for it (or how music worked at all, really). At the time I pretty much only listened to metal, so this was a product of that influence. The original arrangement was way too repetitive; the final arrangement is basically the same as the original except shorter, and the song is much better for it. Once the rest of the instrumentation got written, I wasn’t really happy with it, though I warmed up to it a lot after a while, and now I think it’s one of the better songs on the album. I’m not even really sure how much went into this song for this newest version of the album, but I don’t think it was a lot. That just goes to show how actually good this song has been for all these years.

Jordan:
In the first two drafts of this album, Hidden was the song that gave probably the most trouble. You can find a number of renditions on my YouTube channel by now, all of which are mostly identical aside from, like, tweaked melodies. The original piece was very repetitive, with a bunch of different sections in different styles. One day I was in the mood to severely edit something, I got Hidden out, I spent a very long time taking it apart, changing rhythms, changing emphases, making it feel a lot jazzier in an attempt for cohesion. Every reprise was now a variation in some way. That was v2. This one, v3, received even more editing, now informed by a bit more experience in making a song somewhat cohesive and glued together by vocal lines. As a sort of microcosm of the v3 approach, consider the main riff and how I gave it variation within itself.

This feels like a good time to go into the editing criteria a bit. I genuinely don’t think Lindsay is capable of writing a bad song; that’s not why I edit her stuff. I edit her stuff because 1) she gives me permission, and 2) when you change a song’s context-- e.g. put a bunch of songs into an order, calling it an “album”-- the way you approach the content of an individual song changes. I feel like Hidden was a song that could afford to be more playful than it was, like this was part of how Mythology as an album would introduce itself. It just took me many years to get to the point where I could attempt to do it that service.

This song is meant to be an adaptation of/homage to LizardBite’s Hidden in the Trees, a story about a man who serves the Slender Man for better and for worse. I am pretty sure, when I first decided this would be a cool idea, I had not yet read that story. Whoops! At least he gave us permission to base a song off of it. He’s a cool dude, one of the founders of the Fear Mythos. The lyrics that you see there were based on a weird poem I did in free verse not long after making Viceking’s Graab.

Lindsay:
I started writing the music for this a few months into my first year of uni. It was originally an eight-or-so minute thing, but we decided to split it into two tracks right at the end; having Memento Mori as its own thing helped the album have a better progression. Also the lyrics got rewritten again, and they’re even better than before.

Jordan:
Those lyrics come from the post of the same name, cut a little bit to remove some specifics and kinda turn it into something that I could see being spoken over metal. It’s not actually incorporated in the “vocal lines,” because it’s just meant to be like a spoken-word sample.

The music was originally one cyclic riff (playing four sequences three times). No variation anywhere. It was freaking badass. But after we split it into a separate track, I kept wanting to do something with it. For v2, I made it a sort of “jam.” Just tons of arpeggios, inverted rhythms, and interpolation. Sounded kinda circus-y. Still pretty badass, just in different ways. But then, for v3, I redid the “jam” to bring it more in line with the original tone. This version has a bit less improv now and lets the structure speak for itself.

(I believe the actual reason we split it into tracks was this: We were getting tired of referring to that riff as “the outro riff from Hidden,” we wound up nicknaming it “Memento Mori,” and then we were like “actually it would be kinda cool if Memento Mori were technically standalone so it could be played live out of context.” This kind of logic is rampant in Sunsetters production.)

Lindsay:
This was largely inspired by both the ending of Dream Theater’s ‘Dark Eternal Night’ and Lord Belial’s ‘Prolusio: Acies Sigillum’. It was a repetitive, heavy thing, which fit the mood of the song, ‘cause Stew dies at the end of the blog, spoilers, and I had pictured this as battle music for his fight to the death, or something. It became livelier when we made it its own thing and added variations and whatnot, and I love it.

Jordan:
This song started with a demo I did in GarageBand, one of my better products of the time. I was messing around with the software’s built-in electric piano function thing, and I found a chord progression and accompanying rhythm I really liked, so I turned it into a vamp and based an entire song around that one single goddamn vamp. Only variation was in tempo, to mark the points where choruses started and stopped. Lyrics, for once, were written at the same time as the song. I just followed the rhythm and wrote about what I imagined the song would be about: Domestic abuse. I sang for this too, put it up on YouTube, it doesn’t sound too terrible, I can imagine it being a full band song of sorts, very simple, maybe something some angry punk band would make. But in the end I wasn’t happy with that demo, not totally. And in the end I wanted to make a MuseScore version, to keep a consistency in sound across the album. In the process of making that version, I made it a lot more 2000s alt-rock, a lot more catchy, more exciting, and then for version 3 of the album I redid it from scratch again to sound more like the original. Though it sounds kinda new-wave at times, with those synths. Still angry, riff-heavy, and the guitar ostinatos in the solo are unchanged from v2.

Fun fact: “Your present’s empathy, so enjoy all the self-doubt” is the origin of the album title. ..oh yeah, I took that line out of the lyrics. Well, that fun fact just became a lot funnier.

Lindsay:
This one was all Jordan. At one point I was going to take Jordan’s GarageBand demo and arrange it for a rock band, but I never actually got around to it. By the time I stopped procrastinating on it, Jordan had rewritten it on his own, and it turned out a lot better, I think, than if I had just rearranged it. Like, the original demo is a fine song, but it didn’t really lend itself to being a full-band thing, really.

Jordan:
I added the.. “vocal melody.” By which I mean I added about ten notes to the whole thing. Went a little Tool with it, since Lindsay told me this song was partly inspired by “Lateralus.” A more significant change I made was turning that final section into a heavy climax. By which I mean I clicked on some measures and changed what kind of soundfont they’d use. Added a pitch bend or two, this was the time when I went crazy with pitch bends in every song. ..which I still do. What I’m trying to say here is Lindsay deserves the actual credit, this is a beautiful song, one of my favourites to listen to on this album. Very calming.

One of my favourite fun facts about this song: I included the lyrics in the Topography Genera novella, as it ended with the whole album’s lyrics, and in the copyrights page I credited that page number to Lindsay, but at some point I added more content to the book and never remembered to correct the credit’s page number. So this song is responsible for the one genuine mistake you will find in that book. Thanks, Lindsay.

Lindsay:
For ‘Is This All’, the lyrics came first, then the music, which is generally opposite of how the songwriting process usually goes for us. I wrote the lyrics in about five minutes, and apart from, like, one minor change, the lyrics are pretty much the same as they were when I first wrote them for Terrence Anathema’s Poetry Blog. The music came, like, a day later, and like the lyrics, I wrote it surprisingly fast, over the course of half-an-hour, I think. It was originally supposed to be a My Amontillado song, but Jordan liked it and thought it would fit on this album, so we included it.
Also, you’re welcome, Jordan.

Jordan:
This started as one of the sample things I did back in the day, this was under a different name. It was something about the Blind Man (it was not “Unknowing,” that’s fiction-only). But that thing had no actual point to it. One day I decided the song should be called The Last Sunset, and I wrote these lyrics to go along with the sample shit. Then I dumped the sample shit and played with GarageBand’s electric piano. Came up with the arrangement that still stands to this day. I think I was unintentionally (albeit somewhat predictably) channeling Genesis’s How Dare I Be So Beautiful, off of “Supper’s Ready.” Beautiful movement, haunting sustained chords that seem to fade away into the abyss, I don’t often hear music like it, certainly not in rock or metal. The lyrics I had written for the sample shit, I really liked out of context, thought they sounded like a really bleak melancholy poem. So now these are officially the lyrics to be printed, always, with the song. Even though the song is an instrumental. I like that.

(Yes, we did try to fit the lyrics to the song. Never really worked.)

There was once an arrangement that used a pretty little choir-y soundfont. I think the only reason I reverted to an electric piano-y sound is because I thought that would make more sense for the Sunsetters to do? I can’t see them using, like, synth-driven choir effects.

I wish I understood enough about music theory to know why I like the sound of those chord progressions. It’s probably something, like, contrapuntal. Wait, no, that doesn’t make sense in this context.

Lindsay:
This one was all Jordan, again. I recorded vocals for this once, so did Jordan, and I think Danny. The vocals never really worked, as Jordan notes.

I love how this works as a sort of prelude to ‘Rise’; it reminds me, to bring up ‘Supper’s Ready’ again, of how ‘Horizons’ is a sort of prelude to it.

Jordan:
The second and third movements are what took years. The rest of the song was pretty much always final. (Except for synths in movement one. Took ages to get right. And v3 proved that even more true.) I can’t decide if I dislike these final lyrics, or if that’s just a case of me disliking most song lyrics. Song lyrics can afford to be shallower than, say, modernist poetry, because poetry doesn’t have to dedicate itself to rhythm in quite the same way that song lyrics do. Like, in a song, a line like “How are human minds biggest / When nothing does not exist?” has delivery to complicate it, whereas reading it here by itself, it feels flat. It is the context of the line, its accompaniment by music (and the metafantastic vortex of context that is the overall Sunsetters project), that gives it much more meaning.

Rise was always going to be the big one of the album. We’d decided that when we said “This will be an EAT song, pretty much the final song, of this cool prog album.” With a premise like that, it was inevitable. How did it turn out? Well. I wasn’t sure before, but now I think we’ve finally hit an arrangement that I absolutely adore. Even the 7/4 dance number, what was once a strangely mixed middle is now a vital part of the journey that ties it together. So maybe I see Rise as the litmus test for this bizarre writing experiment: If it’s possible to listen to Rise while thinking “How did the Sunsetters do this?” (instead of “How did Lindsay and Jordan do this?”), then we’re onto something.

For the record, the lyrics are based around three things: My grandmother’s death (and how I reacted to it), Chemical Brothers lyrics, and James Joyce’s “The Dead” (both EAT songs on this album are based on Joyce stories, this was intentional).

Lindsay:
The second Sunsetters/Blind Man’s Book song ever written. Well, the second one I started writing; wasn’t at all the second one finished. A lot of this song was inspired by one of Jordan’s aforementioned songs made of samples; he made one of ‘Rise of Her Rain’ and one called ‘Empty Cities of Blue’, not on this album. I again started ‘Rise’ with the drum line, but I also started writing a guitar line based on the one from the sample-song. The first complete draft was seven-and-a-half minutes, the second shortened to five, the third extended to twelve or so, the fourth is a tweaked version of the third, and this fifth is a further tweaked version of the fourth. The first draft of the lyrics is completely different from the final one; I think the first draft is fine in its own right, but I do still prefer the second one.

Also it’s five movements now. When the 7/4 dance section got added, it was part of movement two, which made movement two be about half the song’s length. So now the dance section is its own movement, movement three, making the song, which is the eighth track, have five movements. I remember back when we were doing the previous version of the album, we consciously decided to avoid eight-and-five references, but this one, at least, turned out to be unavoidable.

Jordan:
I threw Reverie together in a few hours, or at least the first draft. We needed one last thing to end the album, and I suddenly decided “What if we had a faux-orchestral rendition of Blood of the Queen, to sorta reprise Burning Books?” I half-assed a little guitar-and-synth duet to preface it, and that is the story of that. In v2, I expanded the guitar section (technically the expansion was “spatial”) into a melodic sequence of arpeggios, and in v3 I tweaked the melody to make it more pronounced.

Also, it is definitely “Reverie” singular, not plural. I haven’t been consistent with that in the past. But officially the song is a reverie-- a light instrumental written to evoke “dreamlike” atmospheres.

Lindsay:
I had tried my hand at writing ‘Reverie’ at one point; it was a little solo guitar bit, and it sucked. Then Jordan wrote the first draft of this version quite a while ago. His second draft is an extended version of the first, and it works a lot better. It’s a fine ending to the album.