Of Mice & Men's Aaron Pauley guides us track by track through the band’s new album ‘Another Miracle’, which is out now.
A Waltz
“This sat as an instrumental for quite some time due to its intensely theatrical nature and, at times, overwhelming level of production and orchestral accompaniment. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a misanthropic song about self-destruction disguised as something opulent.”
Troubled Water
“This song began as all others do, as an instrumental. It has this sort of push-pull quality in the main riff that works perfectly after the sort of pleaful melodic feel of the choruses. Lyrically, it’s about understanding that some bridges are better left unbuilt because some waters aren’t worth wading into.”
Safe And Sound
“This instrumental was largely constructed from random loops that then had the “metalcore” elements built around it. I wrote the lyrics about my daughter’s journey to earth as a newborn baby, around the time that we were doing these major scans to determine milestones and viability and all of that. It’s a scary time full of uncertainty, meanwhile your heart is literally exploding with love as you prepare to essentially live life with your heart outside of your chest once they arrive.”
Hourglass
“An absolute scorcher of a track. It builds from the intro and never relents. There are moments where the listener can catch their breath, but they are few and far between. Lyrically, it’s about longing to find a purpose before your time runs out, which coincidentally, I’d written before I found out I was to become a first-time father. Talk about a wish for purpose, fulfilled!”
Wake Up
“This song, to me, always feels like soaring over a vast expanse. There’s always a song on every album that’s working title is “Alanis” due to our love of Alanis Morisette. This was our “Alanis” for this album. We even asked her if she’d feature on it, but her management declined. Maybe next time.”
Flowers
“This song is a big, anthemic, tender-yet-heavy track about using the trials, tribulations, and sorrows of life to create something beautiful, be that art, music, literature, you name it. Everyone’s got their own rain, and their own flowers. Instrumentally, this is one of the most beautiful and melodic songs on the album, while also being easily one of the heaviest.”
Another Miracle
“This is a heater of a song that gets to the heart of the matter of miracles and how everyone could use another one, and how each and every individual’s miracle is unique to their lives and their circumstances. This song, as all the others before and after it, started with the instrumental, which had this longing and desperate feeling verses with hopeful choruses, at least that’s how I interpret it.”
Contact
“This is our UAP / NHI song, aka we believe in aliens and think it would be cool to be abducted. Disclosure is imminent. We’re here for it. The song even features some historical samples, binaural audio, hidden messages and backwards masking. This was a fun one to go sort of nuts on.”
Parable
“This was one of the first instrumentals that we wrote for the new album. It started as a few ideas that had been demo’d out while we were on tour. The song is about how, sometimes, life feels like an instructional video made for someone else. “Here’s What Not To Do, For Dummies,” if you will.”
Somewhere In Between
“This song is a more early to mid 2000’s metalcore sounding song than some of the others. It’s lyrically about not really knowing where you’re at or how’re you’re doing or how you’re feeling. Sometimes we’re in between these concrete states or emotions, which feels like being lost in the cracks.”
Swallow
“You’ve heard the expression, “You never know what someone’s going through,” and you truly don’t. This song is about expressing what it’s like to feel like you have to suffer silently. It’s a very tense and swaying track that goes between this sort of delirious sounding verse into a grinding sort of prechorus into this massive, expressive, cathartic chorus.”
Infinite
“This might have been the first track that we wrote for the album. Either this one or Parable, instrumentally. I think that, lyrically, the song is rather self-explanatory. We, as conscious experiencers, are more than our physical bodies. Life has a way of making us forget.”
