#412: Savatage, "the Wake of Magellan" (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k1TMhUxEgY

Switching from Joan Armatrading's unpredictable piano rhythms and soft washes of guitar to Jon Oliva's unpredictable piano rhythms and Chris Caffery's soft washes of guitar, we transition smoothly from jazz-pop to heavy metal.

I sometimes explain my musical tastes to myself (rightly or wrongly) as a logical consequence of my growing-up environment.
My Mom raised me on melodic folk songs and early Beatles and the livelier, wittier Broadway shows, so of course I quickly embraced indie-pop too; my favorite movies played me '80s pop by David Bowie and Oingo Boingo and Starship, so of course I liked New Wave and synthesizers. Nirvana and the Pixies invaded MTV's nice synth-pop program 120 Minutes shortly after I started watching it every Sunday, so I got into alt-rock, et cetera.

Heavy metal doesn't fit this reasoning as smoothly. But I did, a few times a year, go visit my Dad for a few nights. He was a classical music composer and editor (a very good one, although quite minor), and I was the son who loved Holst's the Planets but especially Saturn and Uranus and, above all, Mars, the bringer of war; who enjoyed Krzysztof Penderecki's experimentalism, but only if he was being loud or I was out of vowels while playing Scrabble. For that matter, I liked choral music; heck, I even liked the songs my elementary school choir did, or I hope I did, because some of those darn things remain stuck in my head decades later (although I'm pretty certain my memories are more tuneful than the actual sounds our voices produced). Savatage's "the Wake of Magellan", we could then decide, is for me an heir to those traditions.

Would we be bullshitting? How should I know? If so, the likelihood that your background is different from mine shouldn't affect your enjoyment. The Wake of Magellan, the album, is ambitious: a narrative of an old sailor who has decided to give himself a glorious Viking-like death by drowning at sea, only to find his path intersecting those of (real-news-story) Romanian stowaway children and the (real) murdered investigative journalist Veronica Guerin, until he persuades himself to stay around and do a little alive heroism first.

I understood the tale much more clearly in 1998 than I recall now; certainly knowing each song is part of such a far-reaching tale lets a little extra magic parcel its way into each of them. But the music -- the soaring choruses, the interlocking tapestry of choral patterns (including the insistent tugging baritone 16th-note vocals), the syncopated verse piano, Oliva's hammy pauses before he speaks the last word of the chorus -- is glorious to me on its own.