Released May 19, 2023

Written, produced and performed by Jay Gironimi

Lyrics on “Seance”, “God Told Me a Secret”, and “I Think We’re Going to Hell Tonight” by Rebecca Wrynn and Jay Gironimi

Liner Notes

I’ll be honest, I thought this one was going to be big. Not Billboard chart big, but at least “move 25 limited edition cassettes” big. That didn’t work out for me, but it’s still probably the best all around All Hallow’s Evil album.

After finishing The Grifted Age, I had planned on bringing the synths back a bit and making an concept album about the night of the apocalypse. As 2020 rolled on, the apocalypse became much less interesting to me.

But as the world burned/burns, I found I still wanted to play the fiddle. I wrote some aimless sketches until my wife gave me purpose: she wanted an album about witches. 

Joke was on her, I made her write some lyrics. 

I was hesitant at first, with witches being well worn metal ground, but the album slowly revealed itself, the witches and I standing on the common ground of blasphemy. The concept freed me to write songs about possession and werewolves while still using these songs as an outlet for my anger at the ills of the world as I see them. I guess the apocalypse finds it’s place, whether you want it to or not. 

In any case, if you have not seen the 1982 Halloween episode of CHiPs, it’s one of my favorite pieces of television ever. Happy Days alum Donny Most plays a “devil rocker” named Moloch who rides in a bitchin’ hearse while made up like Gene Simmons with a red theme applied. The plot machinations are your standard tv fare, but the song Moloch sings, “Devil Take Me”, is a tremendous piece of work. I wanted to make something that was as catchy as “Devil Take Me”, but with the heaviness of Paradise Lost and the flavor of Jake E. Lee era Ozzy. So I give you Coven, pronounced with a long “o” in deference to Mark Borchardt and his film of the same name. 

I had also purchased a drum kit on the last day of 2019, which is probably one of the best times in history to have purchased a new instrument, so Coven marks the first All Hallow’s Evil album where I actually played the drums instead of programming or tapping them in by keyboard. I think it helped give a human feel to these songs about inhuman and inhumane things.

Took about three years to bring this one from concept to completion. I did more planning than normal; I wrote everything out in GuitarPro and I did demos, even took the time to write out vocal melodies instead of just winging it like I do most of the time. I thought it came out great, so I got some PR done for this one and even ran up the aforementioned 25 limited edition cassettes.

I still have a few of those, if you’re interested.

At the end of the day, this did slightly better streaming numbers than No Gods, Only Monsters, so it wasn’t a complete failure, even if there was one review that made me consider packing the whole thing in. It wasn’t even a terrible review, it just drove home the point that what people want and what I’m serving up aren’t quite compatible. Or to put it in milder, yet more delusional terms, maybe I’m just misunderstood. Hell, it got me to put this website together.

The cover drawing gave me a chance to indulge in my love of ornate candle holders, a thing I did not realize I loved until a viewing of Hammer’s Kiss of the Vampire. If you know where I can buy some Hammer Films style candleholders, I will probably pay an unreasonable amount of money for a thing I’ll probably never actually use.

-Jay G, March 2024

Track by Track

“Seance” – The original plan for this album was to do a King Diamond style concept album where I wrote the music and my wife would write the lyrics. That never panned out, partly because writing lyrics is a pain in the ass and she’s too busy for that, so I just kept writing (though she did write the lyrics for the chorus here). This one had the working title of “Seance” and I kept it even though the lyrics have nothing to do with a seance. It sounds like a seance to me though.

“The Devil Comes In” – I’m a big fan of Bruce Dickinson’s late 90s solo albums, Accident of Birth and The Chemical Wedding. So in tribute to those, most of the songs on this album are in B tuning, this one included. It’s kind of a pain in the ass to tune a normal 6 string down that low; you have to get thicker strings and set up the guitar and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the point is that I did all that work and this song ended up being in the key of E anyway, like 80% of pre-1991 metal songs. I needed that low string for the verse though!

Lyrically, this one holds pretty true to the witch concept, in that it’s about someone who is to be executed as a witch, but actually does get powers somewhere in that process.

“The Weight of His Blessing” – At some point when this was a story-type album, this was a song about an illicit affair with a priest, but that kept turning out funny, so I scrapped it. Instead it became about dramatically leaving a church by selling one’s soul. I made a video for this one too, which was mostly the process of recording three performances in an empty room and then adding effects until my MacBook sounded like it was going to take off.

“The Promise of the Night” – This was inspired by a movie about a shapeshifting witch called You Will Not Be Alone. The lyrics are about possessing different bodies and having to find new ones when the old ones are all used up. The solo here sounds simple, but it’s the one that took me the most takes because it’s a real bastard to play cleanly.

“Old Wounds” – I actually wrote the music for this back when I thought I was making an album about the apocalypse, but I kept it for this album because I thought the synth line was pretty good and I really like the verses. It’s about those moments late at night when you think of something really stupid or mean or awful that you did a long time ago and it just kind of picks at you for a little bit. Or maybe not everyone does that, I don’t know.

“God Told Me a Secret” – I wrote this after going to the Salem Wax Museum. It’s not based on anyone in particularly, I wanted to capture some of the slightly campy zeal of the wax figures. I could also imagine someone screaming lines from this on a busy street. It’s multifaceted.

“Pepper’s Ghost” – This came about because I bought a 7 string guitar and had to write a song to justify that purchase. It’s probably my favorite song on the album. Pepper’s ghost is a stage illusion where a figure under the stage is reflected onto a pane of glass that’s standing up on the stage, making it look like there’s a ghost in the scene. The lyrics are about how it doesn’t matter what Jesus said or did or even if he existed, because the point of the evangelical movement is cruelty and power, they just need the illusion of a ghost to push the agenda. I guess I was in real chipper mood that day.

“A New Way to Bleed” – For whatever reason, I think of this as a real 80s style Ozzy song, though I’m not sure anyone else would feel that way. Maybe it’s because this is about a werewolf. More specifically, it’s about becoming a werewolf to take revenge for a displaced people, kind of like a folk hero. 

There’s a little tapping part at the end of the lead section that I had to rehearse for a solid week. The first time I tried to record it, it just sounded like I threw my guitar down the stairs.

“I Think We’re Going to Hell Tonight” – I feel like I wrote a lot of songs about selling your soul here, but I pretty much always make it sound like a good thing. Not sure what that says about me.

This had a more traditional solo at some point, but I fucking hated it, so I broke out a cheap, bright yellow Ibanez and did some whammy business instead. My wife says it’s her favorite solo on the album. She also wrote some of the lyrics here, so she might be biased.

“The Grand Deceit” – The working title for this was “Witch March” because I wanted this to have a kind of martial tempo to it. The clean verses were actually very difficult to play/mix, because it was easy to put a little too much pepper on them and mess up the dynamics. I also went back and forth on removing the inhales from the verse, but I ultimately left them because I thought it made the song more human. I guess your mileage may vary on that.

Lyrically, it’s another cheerful ditty, about how people can rationalize all kinds of awful power plays because they can point the finger at a higher power and say “take it up him.”

“Hexed” – A late addition to album, I wrote this one to spice things up in the home stretch. The theme of this is essentially “Yeah, I’m a witch, who wants to fuckin’ go?”

“Calcified Heart” – I read Leslie S. Klinger’s annotated Frankenstein and learned that when Percy Shelley’s body washed ashore and they tried to burn it in a funeral pyre, his heart had calcified and did not burn. That thought stuck with me for years and eventually came out in this song.

This was tough to sing because there’s not a lot to hide behind and there’s not a lot of room for error. I did a lot of takes of this over a lot of days and even listening to it now I find myself thinking “I could give that 3 or 4 more shots”. But it’s done and I have to move on with my damn life.

Like a lot of the other songs here, this song was written in B tuning. That presented a problem because I only have one acoustic and it’s set up for D and tuning it lower made it sound a little too sloppy. I did want a rougher tone here—basically like a couple of people with a couple of microphones playing in an empty basement—but every take just sounded like a mess. In the end, I actually used an acoustic simulator on an electric guitar with the actual acoustic recording doubling it in the background.

“A Final Moment” – I made this the last song because it felt weird to have “this is the end” not be the last words on the album. It’s a first person account of being burned at the stake, kind of like a “Hallowed by thy Name” for immolation. My original plan for the album was to make it very orchestral, but this and “Pepper’s Ghost” were the only two that made it through that particular fire.

Previous Release: This Faustian Flesh (2020 Hindsight Mix)

Next Release: A Beginner’s Guide to All Hallow’s Evil (compilation)