Therion wrote a song for Alice - one wonders why nothing came of it

[sickthing]

From the FB wall of Christofer Johnsson

LEVIATHAN II RELEASE COUNTDOWN INFO 11/12
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Track 11: PAZUZU

So we had two songs written for Alice Cooper and when we didn’t hear back from the guy making the original writing team, Thomas tried to send the songs via one of the guitar players and when that didn’t lead to anything, I sent them to the producer Bob Ezrin. But we didn’t hear back from anyone. We were too late for the ”Detroit Stories” retro album, so maybe that was the problem, they don’t need more retro material. Or they just didn’t like the songs. I guess we’ll never know.
But fact is that it doesn’t matter. Being a massive fan of early Cooper, I would have **** taken the CD with me in the casket when I die if Alice Cooper made a retro album and I was writing a song for it. But on the other hand, if we wouldn’t have had this idea to write songs for Cooper, we would never had written those great songs.
One of the songs is too rock n’ roll to therionize in a good way, so this one I think we’ll leave for the next LLO album.

But the second song was a sad song we could transform into Therion. The original was meant as a continuation of the 1971 Cooper song ”Dead Babies”. It’s a sad story about… wait why am I explaining that? If you’re not familiar with the song, then kindly:

1. Locate the lyrics and listen to the song. And use some decent speakers or headphones, not your 49,95 bucks USB computer speakers from Amazon.

2. Go into the shower, lay down in fetal position and cry for an hour while contemplating having lived your entire life without hearing this song.

Now back to our song… We wanted to do a kind of ”Dead Babies, part II”. Naturally not as awesome and genius as the remarkable original, but still kick ass. Lyrically we had a demo lyric continuing the story. Betty’s mother was long dead and gone and her father was now on his death bed, full of remorse and afraid of the afterlife. Then the ghost of Betty arrives in the night and he tries to ask for forgiveness. But it ends with him dying and Betty leading him to Hell ”to meet Mommy”. We of course understood Cooper would have written new words if the song would have been accepted, but I think it’s not a bad concept.
Musically we didn’t want to try to write in a copying direction, but to the best of our abilities in a style that is somewhat similar to the ”Killer” album (in my opinion their best album).
When the song got rejected (or actually we don’t even know for sure that Alice have heard it, maybe it was stopped already by the gates), I was totally stuck with Alice voice singing the vocal lines, so I decided to keep the riffs and write new ones. After doing that, I still was kind of puzzled to what I wanted vocal wise. In the verse I had made it easy by simply arranging a choir singing along with the guitar chords. We did some recordings trying out opera versions with Lori and other variations for the rest of the song, but I wasn’t happy. Finally we had a go with Erik Mårtensson and he TOTALLY blew us away! But the chorus didn’t feel like it sounded Therion somehow. So I decided to keep searching voices for the chorus and kept Erik for the bridge. In the end it was a combination of Thomas and Rosa that worked the best. But we thought it would have been an insane waste, not to let anyone hear the version with Erik’s chorus, so we decided to release it as a bonus track and call it AOR-version as that’s how it sounds to me.
I also realised that there was a tiny thing in the chords that was disturbing me and we made a last min change to the guitars and finally we had nailed the song.

[Saint&Sinner]

I go in and out with therion, i havent picked up the last couple albums i must say, i didnt know this. Fascinating!

[jacknifejohnny]

Only really heard their fantastic version of “Summer Night City”….but this sounds really interesting