If there's one thing I like more than not writing love songs, it's writing songs about amorality. And if it be made into a story, all the better. Here we have a guy who kills people. It's implied that he's experienced enough in the trade to have developed a jargon for certain tasks. In this case, "the Old Castilian" refers to assassinating a very important official, a fictional king, in fact. Now, this being fiction, I'm also implying that this guy isn't a constitutional monarch. He actually rules a country that's big enough to make a difference. And he is beloved in his country and beyond. But some shadowy group decides that he has to go, so they hire the tune's narrator who gives the play-by-play. The rest is pretty easy to understand. And though he takes great pride in his work, there will come a day when the people who hired him will hire someone else to take care of him. He accepts that and just keeps hanging out at the beach.
This tune was something of an experiment. I wanted to see how many different melodies I could stack on top of the same chord changes. Basically, except for the bridge (the part that tells about the ship blowing up and sinking), you're hearing the same chords all the time. The tune and instrumentation are different, but the chords don't change. This hopefully gives the track unity in the face of what seems like too much variety. It's one of my favorites on a technical level. There's a lot going on, but it doesn't seem like it. Plus, it tells a complete story. There's a beginning, middle and end and at the conclusion, the narrator doesn't come to any great epiphanies. I wish I could write a song like this every day, but alas, something like this only happens occasionally or by accident.
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