Hey everyone! Hope you’re not afraid of ghosts, because we’re jumping right into an album that’s considered haunted by its creators. That’s right, today we’re playing Goliath by The Mars Volta! If you don’t know the full history of this album, I’ll try to break it down quickly here, because it’s a hell of a story that reaches across a couple different groups:
Rodriguez-Lopez discovered an old Ouija board looking thing in a curio shop in Jerusalem and decided to gift it to Bixler-Zavala (Both founding members of The Mars Volta). They would use it during their subsequent tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (this is kinda important) after shows as a sort of ritual, and got to know the spirit(s) contained within the board. Once the tour was done they decided to bring the board to the studio to help make decisions on the next albums direction. After talking to the spirit contained within the board the members of the band and studio engineers noticed an uptick of very unexplainable events and situations, including multiple hard-drive failures, crew falling ill, engineers going literally insane during production and abandoning the project, near death experiences, and more. Before the album was finished, the band would break this cursed Ouija board into pieces and scatter them in the desert.
Now, all of this was in 2007-2008, which falls in line with the timing of John Frusciante discovering the occult, quitting the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and going into hiding for a few years pretty much directly after the release of this album. Interesting tale eh? I definitely omitted some details so if ya wanna learn more you can start with the Wiki page here, and see just how far down the rabbit hole you fall.
Now about the video itself, there’s not too much to say. I tried to keep the spirit of certain solos but for the most part improvised them. It’s a little tough to learn a solo that was recorded in reverse and then play it the other way convincingly, and the song itself is rather chaotic so I figured it would be a fun little exercise to improvise! There’s an octave effect for a couple of the lead parts, but other than that it’s all just one take of crazy squealing guitar noises.
Hope you dig the video, and as always hit up the official YouTube Channel and give it a subscribe to keep updated on new things!
