I spent hours talking to Claude about the nature of paladins in order to keep nudging the lyrics to “Call to the Light” around until they properly established the right tone for opening this album.
It turns out I have a lot of thoughts about paladins.
“Hammer and Prayer” is a crafting song. Our paladin is a miner and blacksmith who crafts their own armor, beginning with copper and moving up to an ore that shines like sunlight.
The sound really came together beautifully on this one.
“Windborn” is a song about taming a gryphon. I was aiming for something between “Born Free” and the fox’s song, “Closer and Closer,” in the Lerner & Loewe musical The Little Prince.
This is another one that took hours of tweaking the lyrics to get right.
In “The Melody is Me,” our paladin fights a death knight:
“Every strike is guided by the light
Falls exactly right
Like notes in a song that the angels are singing…
And the melody is me.”
And there’s the nature of a paladin—classic hubris like in “C’est Moi.”
For “Lay My Hands,” I was trying to capture the moment in Camelot when Lancelot begs the knight he’s just bested in the jousting match to, “live, please, live!” But with the sound of Brian Wilson’s “Lay Down Burden” blended with his daughters’ song “Miracle.”
I needed a really cool villain for the paladin in this album to face, so in “Bone Dragon Rising,” we’ve got a song about a necromancer riding a bone dragon.
The songs focused on fighting skeletal enemies always turn out sounding so good.
“Answered by the Light” is about our paladin bubble-hearthing out of a fight as everyone else wipes. Except taking it utterly, devastatingly seriously at an emotional level.
I went for a sort of “Warmth of the Sun” helpless, floating, lush warmth for the sound.
“What is a Paladin without the Light” is the crux of our paladin’s crisis of faith, and also one of the catchiest tracks on the album.
“What am I without the light?
…
Is the sword still holy if the hand that holds it isn’t sure?
…
Holy, holy — what is holy anyhow?”
My guiding light for telling a musical story about a paladin was Camelot, and so the thing that pulls our paladin out of their crisis of faith is a new, young knight, face shining with the light, demonstrating that the light is still out there.
One of the core paladin game mechanics dating all the way back to Diablo 2 is their collection of auras, and I thought that would be a good note to end on — our paladin realizing that the light is something they share with everyone around them.