Track Commentary: Scrapping Ideas with "AZAB"

March 6, 2026

This past February, I took part in the RPM challenge, where musicians must record, produce, mix, and master an album in the month of February. As an additional challenge, I decided I should also write every song from scratch, which is a stupid idea. In the end, I had only 11 songs total, only 5 of which were good enough to be released at the time.

The first song I had written was AZAB. It started as just the name that I thought of the last week of January. At the time, it was based on a short story I wrote in high school called "Everything is Dead," in which an unnamed girl who was reanimated as an infant survives an armageddon caused by interdimensional bullcrap. Originally, this song name was going to be saved for an album adapting this short story into its lyrics. This changed when I came up with what would become this song's bridge on the first day of the RPM challenge. I then scrapped that concept album, and made Six Feet Over instead.

In between coming up with AZAB: the name and AZAB: the song, I had come up with this intro build that was almost a different song. I was playing something similar to the start of David Bowie's "Let's Dance" and Will Wood's "2econd 2ight-2eer," but because I was playing it on my computer keyboard, the keyboard ghosting was messing up the final chord in this really hilarious way:

When I went to start work on AZAB, I put it into the project file of this build hoping to use it as the intro, but the transition into the verse was too disjointed, so I had to scrap it.

Originally, the lyrics to this song was a love song, but the pacing of establishing the undead protagonist's undead-ness and then turning that into a love story wasn't good at all. The first verse is the same in that version, which made me realize that it would be best to make a song about all of the first world problems of this zombie man.