Ending World is the newest song on the album. After Fred quit in the fall of 1996, I decided to create some very rough sketches of a few ideas I had for new songs, with the intent of not fully fleshing them out until I was in the studio with a producer. I recorded a scratch version of Ending World, version 0.0, in 01/97, the week before Steve started. We recorded version 1.0 in 02/97. I added the noise ending while I was sequencing the album in March, and called that version 1.1.

This song grew out of 2 ideas: First, the odd combination I've experienced of growing up under The Threat, and yet realizing that things change far less than we think they do. The second, which goes along with the first, was to do a song which just sort of looped around and around and around, rather than having a normal intro/verse/chorus structure.

The character singing this song really isn't saying very much. The song itself provides the completion of the meaning of the lyrics. He lives with a sense that his world is going to end, which is audible in the crescendo of noise the song builds into, yet nothing really changes. The same few lines are repeated over and over with only slight variation. I suppose this marks me as being over 30, but it was a very strange thing being 12 and KNOWING that you were going to die in a nuclear attack.

Steve deserves much of the credit for this song sounding good. Like I said, I had purposely left it unfinished, and asked him to see what he wanted to make of it. I hadn't anticipated the creepy, slow and silky groove that it became. Note that just before the last 'verse', you can distinctly hear The Most Annoying Sound In The World (tm) taking over the melody part. The "I am absolutely right..." samples are left over from a session that was done by a voice-over guy in Cleveland in 1992 for the Peace & Love, Inc. video. (6 megs!) The noise was done as follows: We made a very distorted recording of the whole song. While sequencing with Sound Forge 4.0, I faded the end of the song into the distorted version. Then I made a big noise file, from several different sources, used Sound Forge's amplitude modulation to give it the wave sound, and faded the distorted song into the noise file. Finally the noise fades into a straight string/synth tone.
Can you hear what the woman at the very beginning of the song is saying? Have you heard that before?