#§4

It starts almost traditional... Actually, for the start of the song I was inspired by something called 'twelve note music', which I think is a classical term, where you're supposed to play twelve notes und you cannot repeat a note twice, you have to do a separate note. It's also very artistic and a pretentious way of thinking. I heard some of that music by classical pianists playing, and it sounds wicked, it sounds evil, it sounds really strange - so that inspired the initial guitar theme. There's a Mellotron thing in the beginning, it just sounds odd, like it doesn't fit in, almost like a free-form jazz solo or something like that. But it quickly kind of lands in an almost traditional metal thing with a common response type death metal vocal that has a stereo double-tracked normal vocal response. Quite effective I think! I can't remember what happened during the writing process, but I reached a point where I just stopped and felt, 'ok, time for something strange!'. We ended up with a flute solo by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, which was kind of an accident in a way, because I asked him to do a narration, not flute. As he was doing the spoken word bits, he asked me 'do you need a flute solo?' I was like, 'yes, please!‘, while I didn't really have a part for a flute solo! I had to shuffle through the songs quickly in my head before he would change his mind. I had him on the hook, of course I was gonna find a piece! So, he played almost like a common response type flute solo in §4. This is a great song with the ending piece being one of the more evil pieces of music I've written in a long time: it sounds really menacing, sick almost!“ - Mikael Åkerfeldt