This was among the tracks that I was been most excited to release from the .altered project. It was the track that convinced me that it was going to be an album because this one never functionally started as a backing track for the live show.
At one point, I had thought there might be more musical nods at the past records in the of the gods… tracklisting. There were a few bits and bobs that started down that road. “resurrected.altered” began as one of those experiments, with a working title of “insurrected.” The new work that was done on it had originated with things I meant to do with the original but lacked the technical know-how to achieve.
This song contains the very word that I excised from the “forever.altered” lyrics but it remains for plot reasons. In the story, this follows on as the morning-after story from the last track on the original, the ether album. That song (and plot point) had its origins in a Fay Pomerance watercolor, depicting Lilith. There’s a lot of biblical-adjacent elements in that first album. M’s little tour of Earth was meant to conclude with the ether dispatching Lilith to seduce and kill M. In the ether, she succeeds and the album ends with M saying goodbye to life as a human and dying in “these former things.” When I knew that I was going to continue the story in the second album, there was a question as to how I would bring him back. The notion that a destroyed man can find a metaphorical rebirth from a sexual interaction in the morning after was the starting point. But then I wondered if in M’s manipulation of living matter (which gave him his body in the first place) could open a pathway into a second life. So his insemination of Lilith becomes his new body that, in the morning light, leads to a rapid gestation, rebirth and restoration. The process basically has him explode out of her, which is why the tone of the song is so unhinged. And because we already had all that happening in the song, I decided to conclude the track with allusions to the overarching plot of the following albums, which is Lilith prophesying in her death M’s discovery of what would be the Queen character, and his eventual… well, we’re telling that story right now.
There was no real life analogue for Lilith so no one was ever meant to take offense at being called a whore, which is why the word survives in this song. Sex work is real work and I don’t use the term to demean those who do it. I’m not trying to virtue-signal here, but rather I’m showing my work with regard to the thought behind my still using it beyond it being convenient to the rhyme scheme. And anyway, this Lilith was sent with sinister intentions. I love the concept of Lilith because she is left without purpose and in turn rebels against the very self-important figures who cast her aside. That no one has developed that premise into a larger storytelling project is insane.
Lyrics:
And so I came to
In the bed of the fallen whore
The skies of the whole world
A brand new corpse from the night before
This lover sent for blood
The dagger digging out of her core
In the mouth of birth and death
I found not hell… But another door
And in the blood left on the sheets
The tears still fall and my heart still beats
Now with her hair strung through my teeth
Sharing her breath I breathe resurrected
Like a flower doomed to wilt
She laid naked amidst her kill
Then came a violent turning there
The dead womb with the brand new will
This assassin had given forth
A new being that could know no guilt
I felt the flesh and tore right through
This long dead soul is living still
And in the blood left on the sheets
The tears still fall and my heart still beats
Now with her hair strung through my teeth
Sharing her breath I breathe resurrected
“There is another there to find”
She waits for all to hear you sing
You’ve lost hope but remember this:
You’ll suffer no love without the sting”
She pulled my hand to her chest
“Fall to you knees for the news I bring”
She spoke the words with her dying breath
“You’re no longer a man, now go be a king”
And in the blood left on the sheets
The tears still fall and my heart still beats
Now with her hair strung through my teeth
Sharing her breath I breathe resurrected