« Stars Cry » is a dark and edgy piece which started out as an R & D experiment aimed at exploring soft synths and VST plugins.

I often get ideas for new compositions while playing guitar, and, less frequently, bass. Typically, I receive inspiration while trying to practise or learn a specific piece. The new energy takes over, then I completely lose myself in the emerging music, and some time later I realize I have enough ideas for a new song.

But on that particular occasion when « Stars Cry » came into being, on January 1st 2016, I had decided that I would sit down and write, and do so differently. And thus, basically, I looped a drum beat in Cakewalk, and started improvising on my JD-800 synthesizer. I recorded a few ideas, and titled the project file « Moving Field, » from the name of the synth sound I had used.

Then I recalled a reading of William Blake's « The Tiger, » spectacularly delivered by Kristin Hughes, which I had chanced upon while browsing the Internet Archive, and I just knew I had combine the two. From that point on, inspired by the following line of that famous poem,

« When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears »

the project became known as « Sidereal Tears, » and the ideas for new parts kept flowing in until the final shape of the piece emerged. I was happy with the music, but not so enthusiastic about the name, and by the end of the month I finally decided on « Stars Cry » as a definitive title.

Then it was already time to get ready for the upcoming busking season, so I shelved the project.

I resumed working on the track around mid-October, and finalized it about a month later. At that point I had no plan to officially release it, but I was interested to see if I could come up with a frame-by-frame animation using open source software. And so, on March 24, 2017, after a few months of exploring and learning, countless long hours of experimenting with tools such as GIMP, GAP, and G'MIC, and creating a whole lot of images, most of which never made it into the final cut, I finally published the original « Stars Cry » video :

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqWl0IQiXts

I don't have a clear recollection of when the idea first occurred to me, whether it's at their very inception, or while I kept experimenting with that different way of coming up with new music until I had a handful of pieces, but the titles of those other compositions suggest I was already planning of using them for a movie project I had started working on in 2014. Yet, as time went by, it became clear that some those tracks were better suited for a conceptual album I was developing, and thus « Stars Cry » eventually found its purpose as the fourth chapter of « Written In The Stars. »

The piece works well at that point of that particular storyline as it speaks of rage against the cosmos, deep frustration, resentment, and powerlessness, while confronted with circumstances which apparently cannot be changed. The rhythm section, and the repeating bass pattern in particular, evokes an unforgiving force that seems bent on pinning anything that tries to stand in its way back to the ground.

In a sense, the music is a reflection of what I was going through at the time, which was a difficult, transitional period. I was between jobs, and I had decided to completely renew my busking repertoire, from solely original singer-songwriter material, to instrumental fingerstyle covers of popular pieces. I was striving to improve my playing, and in particular to learn percussive guitar techniques. I remember watching a lot of acoustic guitar videos, along with TED Talks on various topics. And as if to make matters worse, I was also suffering from a plantar wart that resisted all attempts at burning it with acid, and frequently deprived me of sleep. For the record though, it did vanish on its own when I finally published the video.

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This particular release is essentially the demoey, home studio version of November 2016, with a few tweaks and edits, yet all the while trying to remain faithful to that original.

This won't be the version that will end up on « Written In The Stars, » as I'm not satisfied with the first instrumental section. An upgrade is in the works.

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