Signs of Life

Signs of Life was actually a fairly late addition to the album. With a couple of exceptions discussed previously, we started writing tracks for what would eventually become Dusk in 2004, and somehow, due to other commitments, it ended up taking around two and a half years to complete.

By late 2005, most of the tracks were written, and in many cases already recorded in their final form, but for whatever reason we held back, making minor tweaks, until it eventually surfaced at the end of 2006. The proposed 2005 track listing wasn't even all that different: Hidden Context hadn't made it on, and Consequences hadn't been written yet, and a couple of more uptempo (and distinctly out of place) tracks were included instead: Running with the Wind and soon-to-be-released Heaven Only Knows. Apart from those, it was almost identical.

By that stage, Signs of Life was already complete (subject to a minor remix in late 2006), but it hadn't cemented itself as one of our favourites, and so was largely ignored. Which is ironic, given that it has since become one of my favourite tracks on the whole album. But at the last minute, we decided to remove The Healing, and put this on instead.

The track is actually mainly Simon's work, from, by his account, a stream of fairly meaningless random words. But for me it struck a chord - in autumn 2004, I moved to an anonymous northern city, and that seemed to me to be exactly what the song was about. There seems to be a strong feeling of claustrophobia, and of being lost in the crowds.

Our 2001 album Ephemeris included a track called Age of Ignorance, which is fairly similar in terms of mood and subject matter - although, given its era, it's probably a lot more pretentious. And many of the sounds on the final version are sampled from Simon's old Yamaha keyboard, which we used a lot on our late 1990s albums Prophecies and Odyssey, which all makes for a strong mix of past and present.