We spent the summer of 1991 rehearsing the "Manic" material and waiting for the chance to play the new songs live. I must admit, there was quite a challenge in playing and singing some of these songs. In the past, most of my vocal parts were written guitar-in-hand. This was not the case with Manic. In fact, I had made a conscience effort not to approach the arrangements this way, rather recording demos of the music and singing along to the tapes later. If you listen to the first two albums, you will notice the vocal parts usually follow the guitar riffs pretty closely. I thought by doing them individually, it would give the effect of a separate vocalist, and generally make the arrangements more varied and interesting. In early autumn we spent two months on the road with OVERKILL. They were touring in support of their "Horrorscope" album and we, and the GALACTIC COWBOYS, opened 38 shows over a seven- week period. The only disappointing aspect was that, as the opening band, we only allowed a 30-minute set each night. With three albums under our belt, and longer than average songs, this severely limited the amount of material we were able to play. We opted to do just songs from "Manic". The usual set list was six songs: "Still Black", "Something Real", "Explained Away", "Paint A Picture", "I Love The World" and sometimes "Dream Again". This was a bit of a letdown to many fans that had waited since "Suffering Hour" to see us live. This is just the way it goes for every band until they get the opportunity to tour as the headliner. One thing this trip did accomplish was to tighten up our playing as a unit. After returning home, we could play the songs backwards in our sleep and although we had maintained a consistent practice schedule (5 nights a week) since the very beginning, there is something about facing the challenge of a new club and a new crowd each night that matures a band like only touring can. It was also at this time that we were given the opportunity to open several shows for MEGADETH. They had just finished a run on the Monsters of Rock tour and had scheduled a few shows to work their way back home from New York to Los Angeles. One of the cities was our hometown of St. Louis and the rest were around the mid-West and the mid-South. We opened a total of eight shows, the largest of which was near New Orleans, in front of a crowd of over three thousand. The overall reaction from audiences was good, for the most part, although due to the poor distribution of the album, most people had never heard of us and were not even aware that we would be playing instead of ALICE IN CHAINS, who were originally billed as the openers. After returning home from this short mini-tour we immediately began to write material for the next album. I believe the first songs written were "Sound the Alarm", "Release", "Grateful", and a slightly re-vamped version of "Tools of Separation". We then began tossing around ideas at rehearsal that would later become "Driven", "Too Many Prophets", "My Soul's Affliction", and "A Screaming Breath". In usual fashion, I later took tapes containing riffs we were working on and began arranging them into finished songs. One significant difference in the arrangements on "Screams and Whispers" is the use of "orchestral" keyboard parts in a few of the songs. This was something that I had wanted to try for quite a while. "Into the Pandemonium" by Celtic Frost had been one of my favorite Metal albums ever, and one of the things that I loved most was the combination of very heavy riffs and orchestral instruments. There was something about it that made the music appear huge and ominous. People had often described our music as pseudo-classical, due to the fact that the songs often contained multi-layered arrangement where each instrument was given a very different place in the musical "picture" which resulted in more interplay than was usually found within our genre. Our goal was to combine elements used by CELTIC FROST on "Pandemonium" with more of an emphasis on melody. The first thing I did was an arrangement of a piece of music I had been playing around with since I was about fourteen or fifteen. It was a fairly typical sounding little piece of "clean" guitar that was basically just a couple of minor chords with individually picked notes running up their relative scale. But when played on the keyboard, along with pulsing, underlying quarter notes, it was given completely new life. I quickly added a few transitional sections and what would later become "Brotherhood?" was born. Then next thing I did was program a few patterns on the drum machine and run it through tons of compression. The combination of this simple chord progression and straight-time drumming created what I thought was something very unique. I knew it was something we could use to broaden the sound of the band, and although this particular demo would not be used for some months, it was what inspired "Grateful" and "Too Many Prophets". It was during this time that tensions began to grow between the members of the band mostly due to a universal dissatisfaction with our record label and what we perceived as a lackluster approach in their support of the previous albums. The biggest division was between our drummer, Chad and the other three members. Chad was increasingly unhappy with our inability to earn money from either record sales or touring. He was married and, with a young daughter as well, he was finding it more and more difficult to support his family while devoting all his time to a band, which was not generating any money. He had always been quite capable of earning a living playing the local bar scene and though I believe he truly respected what we were trying to accomplish musically, he began to criticize our timid approach to dealing with the business side of the industry. When he began to hint about joining a local cover-band to earn a few bucks, we were insulted and began to question the stability of the band, including a drummer who we felt might "jump ship" at any moment. We had spent several years trying to build the following we had, and were concerned that Chad's more hard-nosed approach to dealing with our label might have resulted in us throwing the relationship we had built with them right out the window. Remember, we were in St. Louis, and in St. Louis record contract definitely did not grow on trees. So after much deliberation, Kevin, John, and I decided Chad would probably be happier somewhere else and we would be happier with a drummer more committed to ANACRUSIS. Sadly, we informed Chad that we were going to begin looking for a new drummer. By this time we had written most of the songs for the next album, and had set up a couple of local shows to try out some of the new material. Chad agreed to stay with us long enough to do these last two shows. The remainder of the album was written over the next couple of months using mostly ideas the four of us had worked on together, so even though Chad did not appear on the album, his contribution to the drum arrangements was very significant.