Singled Out: Jesters Of Destiny's Your Lord Good God

Keavin Wiggins | 10-25-2022

Album art

Jesters Of Destiny released their new album, Distorting Everything, today, and to celebrate we asked Bruce Duff to tell us about the advance single "Your Lord Good God." Here is the story:

This song had a bit of a different evolution than most of our songs. Ray Violet and I have been the songwriters and producers of Jesters of Destiny all the way back to 1984 (ahem!), of course excepting any covers we did. Since the 2010s when we were kicking around the idea of new music, we've been on opposite ends of the U.S., he in New York state (and now in the Caribbean!) and myself in Horrorwood, Karloffornia. We got pretty good fairly fast at working remotely; to us it was second nature by the time the pandemic hit while everyone else was trying to figure it out. At any rate, usually one of us writes a song and the other fills in the blanks. On "Your Lord Good God," the song was by Ray who sent me an early version that was pretty complete-arrangement, structure, riffs, title, chorus outline. What was missing was the vocal melody and lyrics to the verses and bridge. In these situations, I get out a handheld microphone and bop around in the studio singing gobbledygook nonsense until I land on a melody. I always sing actual words because I can't get it to work with sha-la-la-sho-bop, but the words don't mean anything. Early in this process, I stumbled upon the opening line "For there can never be another" which fit perfectly in terms of feel and syllables. As I was scatting, I would throw in anything that rhymed. Somewhere "For I have killed my only mother" erupted from me. I sent Ray the rough to see what he thought of the tune. He wrote back saying, "I like it. You gotta keep in the line about killing your mother no matter what." I didn't really like the idea, besides, I'd already gotten rid of both my parents way back in '86 on our debut album in the song "God Told Me To." But he insisted. So, I started working on how to make that fit into the whole song and lyric. I think what I came up with basically works, though I didn't really dissect it at the time of recording the final version. Now, a couple years later (this record was a bit of a journey), in filming the one-take video, I started to see there was a logic to the overall lyric, even with an in-joke at the end referring back to our very first release "End of Time" from Metal Massaccre V. Something subconscious I guess, these songs always reveal themselves a few years after the fact.

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