Singled Out: Animal Drive's Time Machine

03-09-2018
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Animal Drive just released their debut album "Bite!" and to celebrate we asked singer and composer Dino Jelusic to share with us the story beind the making of the song "Time Machine". Here is the story:

The song was written in Croatian language first in 2014. I remember doing a demo on Christmas Eve in 2014. It had very Audioslave riff and lots of measure changes� As time went by, I always thought the chorus was the only thing that would survive in this song, I was looking for the other parts� 2015 came soon, and I really started having Zakk Wylde phase, listening to Pride'n'Glory and ''Order of the black'', still my favourite BLS album. And a lot of riffs from that album had identity and balls. So I thought, maybe I just do a very slow, heavy riff, ballzy and see how it fits with the rest of the song. Even on demo it sounded huge, so I knew when we would do it for real, it would be what I was looking for. Lyrics were complicated but still very simple, with the clear message - Too much is not enough, but still the time runs out and if you run for the money, you got nothing left when you get old, the same old kid is screaming for the days you lost runnin' for basically - nothing. The choruses in the song are very slow, and I had more space developing the melody. I've had Ronnie James Dio in my mind, as soon as I sang the melody, it sounded like something he would write, just with a little more edge.

So I though, okay - now I have the heavy/southern riff with melodic verses and double tempo in the chorus, Van Halen-ish kinda chorus� What am I missing. Animal Drive is known for doing very old school influenced songs, but we would always include a breakdown, which is something old bands wouldn't do. So I made a little Nu-metal breakdown which we cut from the song few weeks before delivering the masters.

Keller had a cool idea for that breakdown, so we did it his way, and I think it sounds very cool. If we weren't so limited with time, we could do a lot more, but I'm proud how it turned out. And so, we decided to go with title ''Time Machine'' although the song title didn't appear in the lyrics. And I felt like something is still missing (probably because I listen to a lot of Progressive stuff and there always has to be a twist ha, ha) and we added the last part on piano and vocals where I sing low (The idea was kinda better than what turned out to be on the track) to display an old man remembering how he lost all his time.

And then I sing with my regular voice, explaining how ''that kid'' that was screaming is gone, ''Cause there's no such a thing as time machine''. We also had a very intro into the song, which was cut by our producer Andreas, he wanted a song to start immediately.

The bridge section in the song is very early 90's heavy metal sounding, to break the riff and the chorus pentatonic scale a little bit. And there you have it, sounds like Animal Drive in the end!

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album right here!

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