The United Dictators Of Mars - SONG - HARBINGER Birds Of A Feather

Birds Of A Feather

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Music: Hensley/Mody, Words: Harris/Mody

Listen, can you hear the wind of a falling star. Daylight, a raging sun through the trees beats down. Into the night ride the cold and fearless unto the culture of aimless nomads. Careless free will, learned through ancestral teachings. Wakened by spirits, redmen long ago.

Foreign hands, ignorance and greed. Birds of a feather now are scattered but their hearts still beat as one. Integrate whiteman, hold out your hands. Let our bloods unite us all as one.

Picture a headdress sewn through the sands of time. Captured upon my head shines its radiance. Quiet they listen for distant ground thunder. Keen senses all an in'jun must use. Blessed is he who can live off the cold baron wastelands. Waken thy spirits redman, it's you will. What are they, heroes or villains.

Birds of a feather why can't we all pass the pipe, dance through the nigh. Across this great divide we learned you are the wise. Together we shall dance and the rains will cleanse us all.

This song is among my alltime favorites because collaboration is what I enjoyed most about being in a band and every inch of this was worked over by everyone. The 2 songs previous to this were all mine and in hind site it's amazing how they suffered because of it. I read Jeff's liner notes and I don't recall him having vocals prior to the music being written. He may have but I wasn't aware of them upon the music writting. Todd and I got together one day in his parents basement and wrote the music and it was wonderfully done in that spirit. He basically would write a segment then I'd add to it until we built this song. The intro was Todd's and in the first half of the verses we each wrote our own guitar melody segment that flowed from the others creations, though Todd started it off. I came up with the more driving second half of the verse. The pre chorus and the chorus section was taken from the instrumental I talked about earlier tha was split into 3 songs. I had no intention of using it that day but it came to me as we were writing the song. What's intersting about the lead guitar sections is that we each came up with the underlying rhythm that the other had to solo over. So I played the first guitar solo over Todd's creation and Todd played the 2nd solo over my creation. The outro of the song is a technique I also used in We'll Meet Again where I take 2 different parts of the song and overlap them to create a climactic ending. In this case it's my chorus over Todd's intro. Jeff called me very late one night, I think I was in bed, and he was stuck with where to go with his chorus. I'm almost positive I came up with the chorus of the song (or a portion of it) and that probably included the title. I think he then came back to me for the outro a day or so later. Billy has some excellent bass work which I think he came up with on his own. A particularly inventive part was the bass run change-up that ran through the second verse- nice touch. I did the same thing with the drumming by making the first chorus drumming completely different from the second chorus. This song smoked live. In the recording I remember working a long time with just Jeff and myself redoing lines but in hind site there's a note here or a line there that I would have probably made him redo if it were done today just to get more power into the take- mainly in the first part of the verses. It's just such a perfectly written song and melody that I want to hear perfection in all places but he was just working so hard overseeing the entire process it was hard to be objective in every little nuance. Sometimes a line was good enough and he probably didn't have as much trust in me then that I could get something better out of him even when the take was acceptable. It's like I noted in the album write-up, I hear these songs in perfection even when they are not and I'm always critical because of it. I want the listener to hear them that way too but none of us were perfectionists. I'm a somewhat sloppy guitar player and there probably isn't a lead take that couldn't have been redone. Usually when I didn't muff it, it was good enough. We all asumed some day we'd get signed and the producer could push us but until then, it just needed to get done.

The vocal melody in this song I actually robbed from another song which Todd Hensley and I had written years earlier for a docudrama project. Feeling that the song (entitled Panic) may never get the exposure it deserved and I really had a liking to the melody, I used bits and pieces of it in Birds of a Feather. I liked it. For some reason in those days much of my writing revolved around the native Indian and their historical experiences. Perhaps it is because I have some native blood running through my veins. Nonetheless, the song would be written.That is, until I became stuck and had to bring Tom into the lyrical writing of some of the bridge pieces and the entire ending of the song. The reason for the ending is because Tom has this unique style, especially back then with the idea of capturing action, adventure and drama. He'd musically put a number of sequences together which, to myself, seem like a number of intro's and outro's which could/can sometimes be confusing to where he would like to hear or not hear vocals over what he had/has written. Over the years he has noted on occasion that I would usually write something entirely different than what he had imagined to what he had written musically. Usually he either likes it or it grows on him. Birds of a Feather is actually a song which I wrote the lyrics before the music was written. Tom had added the ending piece to this song and I had become somewhat confused whether or not it was a section where he would like me sing. So I also had him write the lyrical ending. Perhaps the fact that Tom and I hear something different when we write at separate intervals and then compromise to put the song together is the ingredients to what sets us apart from others. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps. I am interested to know his perspective.

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