Those Who Crossed the Line

Note: This post was written in 2025 and backdated to appear on the day I wrote and published the track.

This is my third attempt at completing 29 tracks during a leap year. The two previous leap years were interrupted by travel, but I was able to carve out the entire month this year. It ended up not being as much of a hurdle as I thought, though I’m quite certain it would have been more intimidating in 2016 or 2020 because I hadn’t yet hit my “I can do this” stride.

Those Who Crossed the Line Ray Toler 2:54

After the production excess of Red Hill Danger Zone, I was low on energy. I think my initial intent was to do a piano piece, but it wasn’t too long after selecting the piano patch and finding the chords that this song appeared. As with many of my tracks from 2024, I don’t have an exact recollection of the process, but a few things do stand out.

The topic of the song wasn’t clear to me until I’d already written a decent amount of the lyrics. I was doing more wordsmithing without worrying about what the words were about, and the main focus was on creating couplets that didn’t make me wince. It had a vaguely sci-fi / fantasy / dystopian shape in my brain, but not any specific narrative.

As it turned out, my subsconcious may have known the entire time what I was writing about, because a few months after completing this one, what it was about basically slapped me in the face and wasn’t ambiguous at all. It came from a seven-book series that I’ve read several times, The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. The only important bit about it for our purposes today is that there are two tribes engaged in a generations-long war. One side, in desperation, manages to split the world into four elemental worlds: air, fire, stone, and water.

I first read the series in the mid-to-late 90s and even wrote several pieces of music inspired by it. At the time, I had a very ambitious 4-album set planned, one for each of the worlds. In my mind, it’s always been this epic hybrid orchestral and synthesized thing. While my ability to make decent sounding orchestral tracks was crude by current library standards, I’d gotten a passable sound out of my synths and romplers.

None of the works, however, were songs with lyrics,¹ so it wasn’t obvious to me when I wrote this track that it (mostly) fit in that universe and, potentially, on my project. Now that I know what this song is, though, it made me think that I should dust off and revisit those old projects. I no longer think a four album sequence is needed, but maybe it could become a good single album or multiple EPs.

Where I’m torn is whether or not I’d include this track. It’s definitely inspired by the books (as is one other Song-A-Day song), but it’s not exactly “correct” in terms of the story. My dilemma will be whether or not to adjust the song, or simply accept that “inspired by” allows me some leeway. My gut says that it’s better for the song to be a good song than for it to be canonically accurate.

Production and Arrangement

The track doesn’t have a whole lot of complexity – piano, vocal, and a full orchestral string section. At first I was just playing underlying string chords to provide a rich pad for the piano, but I quickly heard more going on in my and shifted to individual sections. I’m still working on my orchestral programming skills, so it’s not exactly where I want it to be, but I’ve come far enough that I can already hear how superior it is to my initial tracks from back in the 90s.

y vocals seem overly harsh to me, and I attribute that to using a “vocal plugin” rather than my normal approach. In this case, I used iZotope Nectar 3. Now, this is a perfectly fine plugin, but I don’t really know how to use it well, so I ended up letting it do its AI² thing. The result is way too sibilant and harsh in the high end, though I have to admit that I was kind of going after that ringy-hissy reverb effect that was used to such luxurious effect on George Michael tracks. I’ve got the bloom and everything happening pretty well, so it’s probably just a matter of rolling back some EQ on that very high end.³

I’m also not sure if I think the vocal itself sounds harsh because Nectar got it wrong, or if Nectar got it right and I’m just not liking how present my vocal is. It definitely sounds more “technical” and bright to me, and maybe it’s just a matter of me having become accustomed to a darker sound in my own mixing. This is one that I’d want to pass by a more experienced audio engineer for comment.

In the end, this song was a surprise. I’m happy with the lyrics, I think it’s a good melody, and I’m even ok with the arrangement, though the “more” in me says I should add in the rest of the orchestra. Most of my Song-A-Day years end with me stumbling across the finish line with a contractual-obligation track⁴ but this time I ended up with one of the stronger tracks for the entire month. Even better, it’s got me thinking that there’s a lot more to explore and that I need to head back to the sundered worlds of the Death Gate Cycle.

Lyrics

I stare into the darkness
Something stares in return
The lesson set before me
Is one I cannot learn

Who are the titans calling
There is no way to know
Always and ever falling
Fire in the snow

I did not sign the covenant
I did not have the spine
But everywhere the soot remains
From those who crossed the line

The land lies in fetters
I hear the faded screams
A snare laid by my betters
In reticulated beams

A billion stars are calling
A distant lambent glow 
Always and ever falling
Fire in the snow

Copyright © Ray E. Toler, Jr. All rights reserved.

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Keyscape, Spitfire Symphonic Strings

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

FabFilter, Gullfoss, Nectar 3, Valhalla Delay & VintageVerb

Notes

1
Or any vocals for that matter
2
Not really
3
After I finished writing this entry, I opened up Nectar and poked through things a bit to find that I didn’t have the de-esser enabled. Just adding that made a positive difference, so I already have a starting point for fixing everything. I get nervous with de-essers because I tend to be ham-handed with them and making vocals sound like they have a lisp.
4
Not that they’re not good, only that they’re normally not technically demanding things because I’m mentally exhausted.