Semi-wasted week?

Last weekend I went through a couple of nearly-complete remixes and finished them up. I think. (One can never be 100% sure of these things, especially when using such a delicate word as "finished".)

I soon, however, got stuck and sidetracked on one called The Cathedral Room. It's not a Great Song, and it never will be. It's a fairly short "linking" bit from the original long version of the rock opera.

What I really like about less-than-fantastic songs is the license they give me to experiment on them. I've chopped out beats and half-beats throughout to give it an odd meter it didn't originally have. I've altered the chords to make certain things fit together a different way. I changed the intro because I came up with something off the top of my head that I liked. It will still be less than fantastic, but hopefully with an extra "how the hell did he write that?" mystique to it.

It was an easy and obvious choice to cut this one for the CD version. I was sick of addressing religion, for one thing. But something occurred to me about it that makes me feel a little better: although I am attacking people's beliefs here, it's not about God, Heaven/Hell, or so on. It's about the way people turn other things, like money, college degrees, social hierarchies, the 40-hour workweek, and a multitude of other lopsided value systems into religions. Religion, in this case, meaning any belief that society treats as an unquestioned absolute, to the point where if you ask why, people will take deep personal offense and bark "that's just the way it is" at you.

The thing that annoys me is how much time I've dumped into playing with this one short track, relative to the amount of actual work that got done on it. I should have been intermittently cutting away to other things. I guess I just got kind of obsessive about it.