About a month ago, Prognosis released their rather excellent new album Definition (pick up your copy from here). Wanting to delve a little deeper into their music and what makes them tick, we asked them to give us an insight into their favourite songs and influences. Check it out and get involved below…
A song that influenced Prognosis
Dream Theater – Dark Eternal Night
It’s hard to nail down one particular song that has directly influenced us as a band, but one song that is always lurking around, whether that’s Christian and Aaron jamming its riffs or its hard-edged progressive mentality impacting the way we often approach songwriting, Dream Theater’s Dark Eternal Night is a big song for us. I wouldn’t say that we particularly sound like Dream Theater, but their progressive metal template has always been inspiring to us, I just think we then take that and go in a different direction. Every time we hear those riffs, which combine heaviness and mathematic technicality so seamlessly, we want to channel some of that in our own music. For myself, Dream Theater are masters at turnarounds and transitioning one complex section into another and so they’ve always been a big influence in that respect. With Drones, that intense Petrucci attack is as present as it has ever been in Prognosis.
A song they wish they could have written
Queen – Innuendo
This one’s Aaron’s choice, and a cracking one at that too. When we were sat in our practice room discussing this playlist, we found ourselves casting our minds back to when music first made a big impression on us. Christian cited Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as the song he wishes he’d have written, Danny mentioned Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire and mine would be Mastodon’s The Last Baron (there’s a riff in that which inspired the outro of The Sycophant) but the way that Aaron spoke about this Queen track really resonated with me.
Queen is one of his favourite bands, without a doubt and I think we’d all like a little bit of their epicness in our tracks. In a way this track is progressive, it’s definitely full of different styles, textures and twists and turns so for me it had to go on this playlist. And what did Aaron say you ask?
“This song really opened my eyes when I first heard it, especially in the orchestral but it was like woah, they’re doing something different and exciting.”
That’s a reaction we certainly strive our listeners to have with our music.
Their favourite Prognosis song
Waste
Our favourite song to perform has always been High Road, it’s just so much fun and it has so much energy, but the song from Definition we are most proud of is definitely Waste. I think this track is the jewel in the record, the epic-reaching longest track it is a song which only worked when we all started putting our own personalities and ideas into it. Like most of our songs, it was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle but in the end, we’ve ended up with a very detailed, progressive song. While time signature changes are few and far between on the track it is always progressing, every section which repeats does so differently, such as the verses which grow heavier and angrier to match the lyrics and the final chorus with a solo fizzing about underneath the vocals.
Lyrically it follows family arguments which I was always stuck in the middle of that I felt were just so bitter and narrowminded and hammers home the ephemerality of life and the need to forget grievances and move on. Rarely do we play a set where we don’t perform Waste – it’s a very dynamic song and it incorporates all elements of our sound at one point or another.
A song they’ve been listening to a lot recently
Black Peaks – Aether
I’ve been hooked on Black Peaks for years and their new album is a cut above. I first heard this driving down to Brighton to play Mammothfest and everything about this track, and indeed the album as a whole, I find incredibly inspiring. Vocally, Will Gardner is so versatile, his lyrics are really powerful and his delivery gives me chills. It sounds absolutely huge, the way the chorus comes in every time. It really is a special song. There’s a big Mastodon element to this whole album (Eternal Light has some proper banging riffs) and the band are definitely inspiring and influencing the newer material we’ve been writing. I don’t think there’s a better British rock band out there at the moment.
Their all-time favourite song
Huey Lewis & The News – The Power Of Love
Discussing this together opened up a massive can of worms. There are a lot of bands we all love to listen to but one of the best things about this band is that our personal tastes are so varied and diverse, it pushes and pulls our songs in so many directions. But then the downside of that is just how difficult it is to pick an all-time favourite track we can all agree on. Elton John’s Are You Ready For Love is my all time favourite because of the personal connotations, while Christian settled on the Pokemon Theme, which is a song that filled us all with a lot of excitement during our childhoods. Then Bowie’s Life on Mars? got mentioned, it’s just so haunting, it has such an unmistakable gravity to that song.
Then, finally, Danny perked up and professed his love for Huey Lewis & The News. He has written some absolutely brilliant music in his time but nothing tops The Power of Love. It’s fun, quirky and insanely catchy and for that, it makes our playlist. It’s not a song you can just sit down and listen to, it makes you get off your seat and it makes you smile and we all love music that does that, I mean, that’s why the four of us picked up our instruments and wanted to form a band in the first place. Take it away, Huey.
