Created By: Jonathan Dysart (DJJD)
Original Creation Year: 2006
Year of Re-master: 2010
Song Listing
Side A
Side B
Side C
Side D
Origin of the Album
Dedicated to my brother-in-law…
I just finished a very satisfying and successful album DJJD Volume 18, having all of these ideas springing out at once. When I was finishing up the final stage of DJJD Volume 18, a new countdown show was being shown on the music channel VH1.
VH1’s Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of all time
While watching this show, I started writing down those songs that would be good in an album. This is similar to what occurred with my Soul album DJJD Volume 14 with the Time Life Soul Music collection. I then selected those songs that I like, did not possess yet in either my DJJD CD collection or my other CD collections, and would have a good chemistry with the other songs on the album. I then added other songs on the list that I liked that was not on the list, in particular from Ace Frehley, Rob Zombie, Nirvana, Mötley Crüe, and Guns N’ Roses.
After finishing DJJD Volume 18, I did not have any ideas for the next album, except for this Heavy Metal list. Eventually, inspirations for DJJD Volume 20 would come out from DJJD Volume 18 and the Heavy Metal / Hard Rock list I made for this album.
Concept and Theme of the Album
DJJD Volume 19 is basically a collection of songs from the Heavy Metal and Hard Rock genres.
I've have never been a devoted Heavy Metal fan – more hard rock than Heavy Metal. However, I did have some people who influenced me and opened my eyes to this genre. The first was Jim Smith from Judson College. Jim and his roommate were devoted KISS, Van Halen, and Rush fans, and played a lot of Hair Band metal from the late 1980's. Then there was Alex from work, who was a devote Heavy Metal nut who loved just the obscure Metal bands.
And thirdly my brother-in-law introduced me to Nirvana, Rob Zombie, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Primus, Korn, and Slayer. The bands that I liked the best were Nirvana, Rob Zombie, Black Sabbath, and some Metallica. Adding “Raining Blood” by Slayer and (in the remaster) “Master of Puppets” by Metallica were bold moves in my behest.
Concept and the Album Cover
The
most iconic art covers came to mind when thinking up of an album cover.
Those Heavy Metal art that comes to mind would be from Iron Maiden, the
beautiful art from the Heavy Metal magazine,
and the album cover of Queen’s News of the World. With
those in mind, I start searching the internet to find any art with those
specifications. Then I found a picture of a crazed robot that is
about to smash a guitar with lightning shooting out from the sky. I
decided to use that.
When remastering this album, I was not satisfied with the current album
cover – it looked too dull. I started looking through my brother-in-law's
CD collection for inspiration. I remember a brief discussion that Shawn
had with me over the history of Black Sabbath – how Ozzy Osbourne left the
band, and then Ronnie James Dio replaced Ozzy, and when ex-Electric Light
Orchestra drummer Bevan joined Black Sabbath for a short while in the 1980's.
From there I decided to look through some of Dio’s solo albums, and I came up
with an album cover similar to this shown below.
The main character looked demonic but not overtly – more comic bookish. I
used that as inspiration to find art similar to this, but not “over the
top”. Then I found a great picture of a creature in the clouds that was a
cross-section of Aries the God of War and the comic book character Spawn.
Since many Heavy Metal albums tend to use the colors Red, Black, or white
(chrome), I decided to have the back album using those colors. I found a
red picture taken from a Video Game as the background. I tend got a Heavy
Metal (medieval like) font for the album title and song listings.
Now
it looks like a Heavy Metal album!
No comments:
Post a Comment