Singled Out: Darren Michael Boyd's The Earth is B Flat

Keavin Wiggins | 05-22-2020

Acclaimed guitarist Darren Michael Boyd tells us about the track "The Earth is B Flat" from his latest album "Lifting The Curse". Here is the story:

The song The Earth is B Flat is instrumental - despite the absence of lyrics, every composition has a story! A few years after a car accident, I found myself working on my instrumental album as a form of expression and healing therapy. I was apparently watching too many X-Files reruns at the time, because this song morphed into a somewhat sci-fi sounding track, complete with some "unnatural" sounding harmonics, and a spacey sounding use of the whole-tone scale. If you watch the music video, I think my inspiration for the song is pretty blatant!

I must say - the therapy was successful. Music has magical healing powers and is one of the best languages in existence.

The title of the song was just something that I thought was absolutely hilarious at the time, and I had to make sure I put at least one B-Flat chord in the song, since the key is actually E-Flat. I really don't think anyone noticed.

The source of the main pulsing riff is the silly part of the story. My sphynx cat, Sedona, often gets up on my lap and bites the strings of my guitar to get my attention while I'm playing. This resulted in a "teasing" kind of riff I made up on the spot, while trying to discourage her disruptive behaviour. The feline behaviour modification experiment was a miserable failure, but the song turned out to be pretty cool!

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