Fallen

It may not have sounded it, but Fallen was one of the oldest tracks on the Dusk project. But not the oldest of all, as will be revealed soon...

Fallen started life as a sequel to a track called Swan Song, from our 2002 album Zero. Both were started well before the album came out, so its origins probably go back to mid 2001. Superficially, Swan Song is about a rock band on its last legs, going out on a blaze of glory, and so its sequel, initially called Come Back (with the footnote "the one after Swan Song") was about the not-so-glorious comeback.

I'd also made a vague request that Simon should write a song where the chorus and middle eight should have the same chords, so that the two could be combined in some sort of marvellous crescendo at the end (in fact, the chords for the verse are the same as well). So at some point around the time we were working on Empires, that is what he did.

You'll probably have realised by now that one or two things went wrong with the whole procedure. It's not called Come Back; it's not about a band making its comeback; and it doesn't have any sort of marvellous crescendo at the end.

Somewhere along the way, we realised that the whole thing wasn't really working out, and so we ditched (at various times) all but one line of the lyrics, and also reworked the whole production as well.

Instead, we ended up with (in my opinion) one of the stronger lyrics I've ever written, and actually a pretty good song generally. It may not ever have been album material, but it's a track that I'm very pleased with, and one of the ones I go back and listen to every so often.