Wasp was written for the 2011 RPM Challenge. More than anything else I’ve done, this album was a concept album. The idea was to write a soundtrack that used leitmotifs to represent characters or events (an idea I borrowed from Bear McCreary and Richard Gibbs‘ soundtrack to Battlestar Galactica). The original concept was to create an original story framework, but I settled on using an actual story, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson — a book I was reading in January (the month before RPM).
Never before have I really plotted out an album (or a song), but at the end of January as I was finishing the book, I started making notes that would inform the timeline of the album, possible themes and characters to explore as leitmotifs, and important events in the book that could warrant their own track. From that, I created a track list of 10 tracks which was shuffled and pruned (the original track count was 12) a bit as I was creating the album.
The completed work is a 55 minute tribute to Stieg Larsson’s novel that centers around the character of Lisbeth. Album art was created by Erin based on a desktop wallpaper she did for Arcane Palette (also for the month of February).
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