The Hollow Appears On The Afterman: Ascension Track 1 Length 2:11 Produced By Coheed And Cambria

Michael Birnbaum

Chris Bittner Preceded By (none) Followed By Key Entity Extraction I: Domino The Destitute

The Hollow is the first song on the 2012 album The Afterman: Ascension.

At 1:07, a recurring piece of music is played. This same melody later appears in the saga on the tracks The Broken, Everything Evil, God Send Conspirator, The Ring in Return, The Light & the Glass and Keeping the Blade.

Lyrics Edit

Sirius Amory: "All-Mother, are you awake?"

All Mother: "I am always awake. What do you require of me?"

Sirius Amory: "You'll stay with me won't you?"

All-Mother: "I'll be there every step of the way."

Meaning Edit

In the coffee-table book published with some of the Special Editions, Claudio gave insight into how he came up with each track on the album. For this track, he wrote:

"The Hollow started with one line that I'd been playing around with. Sometime later, I was at the studio and began fleshing it out on John Medeski's Steinway piano when Josh wandered into the room. We started noodling around on the keys together and it hit me that maybe we could bring the "new and the old" together, much like we did with "Keeping the Blade ." So we transposed "The Ring in Return" melody into what I was working on, while maintaining the foreboding beauty of what we wanted to capture with "The Hollow." I wound up finishing it at The Big Beige on a Wurlitzer, another musical element we thought we should bring in from the past.

With each note, The Hollow is meant to express the feeling of anxiety about not wanting to head out into a great new world alone. The idea of the All Mother was something I'd been considering for a while and had even thought about hiring a voice actor to do it. I'd thought about getting my wife, Chondra, to try it, since she's often there and involved in many facets of Evil Ink and the Coheed universe to a lesser degree--but it was Josh who wound up suggesting her to do it--which solidified to me that it might work. It did."

Music Video Edit

Even though this is not the official "The Hollow" music video, this clip talks about the story behind the song.