First of all, I apologise for how late this journal entry is. Secondly, I apologise that it is not a week's worth of songs. But when I researched what pieces of music I wanted to talk about, I re-discovered a song that used to be very close to my heart. As such, I thought it deserved a feature of its own.

                                                                   

                                                 The Mars Volta - The Widow

                                                                   



An inspiration when writing my first novel, I was obsessed with this song in my teenage years. Re-discovering it almost a decade later, I found that the lyrics and music are no less powerful now than they were then. It speaks to the heart, it pounds the heart. The lyrics are sublime as his vocals take over all - never going below the alto register - and as the accompanying instruments take on a life of their own, it is a song to turn the lights off to and truly become lost in.

This is the edited version of The Widow. The full version includes an outro featuring organs and strange electronic noises. If you can find it, I highly recommend listening to it.

The Widow is from The Mar's Volta's second album, Frances the Mute, and was dedicated to their sound technician Jeremy Michael Ward, who died of a drug overdose in 2003. However, this resulted in Cedric and Omar deciding to quit taking opioids.

It was their only song to make it onto the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, and reached number 20 in the UK Singles Chart.

The Mars Volta are a progressive rock band from Texas, who use a wide variety of genres in their music. As to their name, Cedric Bixler-Zavala - frontman and lyricist of The Mars Volta - stated, "The Volta is taken from a Federico Fellini book about his films, what he characterises as a changing of scene, or a turnaround; a new scene to him is called Volta. Y'know, changing of time and the changeover. And Mars, we're just fascinated by science fiction so and it's something that ultimately looked as in anything I write, its meaning is always up to the listener. As the way we write songs and words, if it looks great on paper then to us it's like painting, so if it looks good meaning the second then people usually have a better interpretation than we ever would."

They broke up this year so that Omar Rodriguez-Lopez could focus on his new project, Bosnian Rainbows, but their songs will remain with us, striking and poignant in their use of instrument, lyrics, and vocals.