Originally I wrote this song “Faith Rider” as a joke.
I was having a conversation on mixi(Japanese facebook) with one of my friends who likes heavy metal and motor bike and he came up with a word “Gay Rider”, which meaning I didn’t exactly know, and he said maybe I should write a song by that name, it was a joke.
But I thought it would be interesting and I was already hearing the melody in my head. And 15 minutes later, I got the song.
I made up a simple demo and my friend liked it. And we decided to play that song with our “just for fun” tribute band. We played it in some party and it was good. And I decided to play that song in my own band IMARi ToNES, and I changed the title to “Faith Rider”, and came up with the lyrics. And after several times of rehearsals, it turned out to be a very powerful song, expressing both faith for God and hard core spirit.
It is a simple song. Simple and typical heavy metal song. Because this song is originally a joke song, it was a kind of parody of Judas Priest. It’s somewhere between “Painkiller” and “Hell Rider”, I tried to write some heavy metal parody. And I’m using many simple power chords. Usually I don’t write songs this way, I prefer using more complex chords and riffs. But in this song I used many simple power chords. But just to make thing a bit more interesting, I wrote the main riff using 7/4 times. And just as an homage to Stryper, I added the words “we are soldiers under God’s command” in the lyrics.
This song is different from other IMARi ToNES songs. It’s exceptional. It’s more simple and easy to understand, and it’s more powerful.
In the beginning it was a joke song, but it turned out to be one of band’s most powerful songs. This often happens in the history of Rockn’roll. Black Sabath “Paranoid”, Led Zeppelin “Whole a lot of love”, Deep Purple “Smoke On The Water”, I heard they were just a additional song written in the last minute.
So now I made a cheap movie of this song, using photos from our latest photo session. These photos represent the character of our band very well. We are always somewhere between heavy metal and pop/punk. Too heavy for pop listers, too pop for headbangers.
I wish we could come up with more professional movie, but it’s okay we are just an unknown band from Japan. Possibly the only metal band in Japan carrying a sign cleary saying “Christian Rock”.
If any of you like this song, we are glad.
p.s.
Just as mentioned above, we had a photo session and now all our websites are updated with those new photos.
You can check the photos here.
http://www.myspace.com/imaritones/photos/albums/photosession-august-2010/969458
http://www.reverbnation.com/imaritones#/page_object/page_object_photos/artist_243863
Tak / IMARi ToNES