Acid Reign

Phew—an item off the bucket list!

Finally, I managed to record “Acid Reign,” one of the first songs I’d ever written (and the first I was probably really proud of).

You can stream Acid Reign here.

“Acid Reign” was written back in 1998-1999. I remember collaborating on this song with Mounir Baalbaki (@thenameismoon), the bass player of my old band.

I remember when I first came up with the intro, I couldn’t stop playing it—the oriental vibe was so catchy to my ears. I remember showing it to Mounir, and we just started bouncing ideas off each other. We eventually ended up writing the song.

I remember when I showed him the lyrics, I was so elated by the play on words of the title (Acid Rain…Acid Reign…get it?) We ended up changing just one verse, and voila! We had a song we were both really happy with.

Afterwards, we demoed the song on my old four track, with Mounir on bass/backup vox, and yours truly on guitars/vox. No drums, no keys—nothing. Just guitars/bass/vox, and a guitar solo which I recorded one night in my room, in our country home with a view of a huge field of olive trees.

The song we recorded ended up being our favorite song back then. To our ears, it was the metal song of the year. It was heavy, crushing, and evil. It had riffs, growls, an evil midsection, and a blistering guitar solo. Really, It had everything a 16/17-year-old metalhead could hope for! We played it to our friends while cruising in our cars, while chilling in our houses—everywhere.

I remember making CD copies and distributing the demo to everyone. We even submitted the song as a demo to a record label, hoping to get signed, become famous, record albums, tour, and dethrone Metallica from their spot on top. Ahh, the dreams of adolescents—so beautiful, so pure, and so strong they can move mountains.

Lyrically, the song is about despotic tyrants who unleash terror, lies, and fear on their subjects. The song has a very apocalyptic vibe—images of war, burning skies, corpses lying everywhere, and children crying while covered in blood.

Imagine any end-of-the-world Hollywood film like I Am Legend, 2012, and The Terminator, and you’ll get the picture.

I’ll be honest with you—the theme of the song doesn’t really cover new terrain. Almost every metal band in the world has written songs about tyrants, war, and the end of the world. It has been done many times before. However, what saddens me reading the lyrics 25 years later is that it’s still very relevant today. It’s as if the lyrics were written about any insert-name-of-tyrant living today.

To put things into perspective, this song was written a quarter of a CENTURY before. Yes, I used the word century. It was written before iPhones, before social media, and around the time Google was still being invented. It’s older than most of Stranger Things’ young cast, but it still seems so relevant today.

This is something that really saddens me. Humanity will never learn.

I tried to stay as true as possible to the original demo while recording it in 2023. We made a few changes, like detuning the song to D to make it heavier, adding some creepy, menacing ear candy, courtesy of the producer Hadi (@hadiplaysmusic), and adding drums (of course!) But that’s about it. I even tried playing the exact same guitar solo I wrote back then, but ended up changing just the last bit to suit the new drums. Aside from that, pretty much everything else stayed the same.

The thing that upsets me as I mentioned earlier, is that this song is still very much relevant today. There are still wars being waged, people still dying, and tyrants still reigning. When will we ever learn that there are no winners in war?

But on a more personal level, the 16-year-old Fadi is very happy! This song has a very dear and sentimental value to me, and I was able to record it now, release it, and finally listen to it properly without the scratches of the demo tape. I must say, though, that I still hear those scratches even with the new version of the song. To my ears, they are forever etched into the song

After I told Hadi about the story and history of the song, he suggested adding a reversed-type recording of the original demo at the end, as a nod to the past. This is the scratchy outro bit towards the end. So, in a way, you can still hear the playing of the 16-year-old Fadi and Mounir on this final version. The song has come full circle, past and present intertwined.

And, by the way, Mounir is still one of my closest and dearest friends to this day. Cheers bro—this one’s for you too!