AREA 54 - To Conform is to Suffer

The story behind this track is this is as follows:

At the time, everyone was doing the Nu-metal thing with riffs that had the fret1/fret2/ type riffs, and I remember seeing a few reviews in various magazines saying things like "someone needs to tell them that solos and Harmonies are not cool anymore".

Being as young as I was, it bothered me a lot that I was dealing with bad reviews based on the fact that we had harmonies or solos. The way I saw it, all the bands that inspired me at the time such as Guns N' Roses, Megadeth, Iron Maiden etc.,all did solos or harmonies - and I never gave a fuck about the in thing; I always just followed my passion.

So this track started out as a message to those critics that decided it wasn't cool because of those reasons.

Soon after, Trivium, Bullet for my Valentine and a whole load of other bands came through and got praised for doing harmonies and solos...Yes, this did piss me off.

It takes a long time to realise that a critics opinion is just one opinion, and if the sheeple make up their mind based on a review, then fuck them!

The lyric "Wasted Years, play on me" was me saying that the lyrics from Iron Maidens' 'Wasted Years' would go around in my head like a mantra, telling me not to waste my time and to enjoy the '"golden years", but that I just couldn't no matter how hard I tried, because I had the weight of the world on my shoulders as it was, and on top of that, people telling me to conform was more than I could handle, because the band was the only thing I cared about, and I wasn't going to change it for anyone..

I like to think it has a positive meaning though, as the core message in it is this: DONT change who you are for anyone.

twitter.com/lakiskyriacou

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Area 54
• Love & Bullets
• Nemhain
• Iron Maiden
• Megadeth
• Conform
• music
• metal
• harmonies
• solos
• rock
• guitars
• bass
• drums
• vocals
• suffer
• Bullet for my Valentine
• Trivium
• Guns n Roses
• Pantera
• Iced Earth
• Lakis-K
• Lakis Kyriacou
• noisysod

[LakisMusic]

@darkfieldsofme Cheers man!! :)

[darkfieldsofme]

Awesome :) since the whole trvium/etc revival thing i've always said that 54 were ahead of the time, a few years later who knows what would have happened. Loved the fact that A54 were always true, selling out was never an option :) fuck the haters