Okay, the songs for A Cowboy Zombie XMas are really coming together now, so I wanted to take a few minutes to collate the story so far and lay out the track list, just to start organizing this thing as a whole.
The overarching plot "line" runs something like this:
1) waaaay long ago some bad shit happened that essentially opened the door to the existence of what we call The Zombie Lord. Call it a tear in the space-time killtinuum. Somebody opened something they should have left closed. We'll try to work in a Seriously Ancient Deep Crow. I'm still figuring out how it works when he is asleep/dead and reawakened. I love the idea that it's the same being, but reawakened every few millenia in a different person. So there was a Roman ZL, and a briefly-lived Cowboy ZL, etc. This is noted in "I'll Follow You Into The Nine-Bladed Soul-Sword", which is a parody of "I'll Follow You Into The Dark", and which may or may not make the final album (not sure yet if parody covers will really work... we also have a nice version of Gravedigger...)
2) Set in the cowboy era we have a love and death tale of a miner/gambler who falls in love with the deputy's daughter and they start a beautiful life together but then BAM (this is not an album of happy endings) there is a Zombie breakout in the town and he finds her at last only to realize that she's been converted to a zombie and DAMNIT but he knows what he has to do, so he lures her into the saphire mine and blows the shit out of both of them. UNRESOLVED: who is this guy, really, and why does he know about Zombies anyway? Also: how does any of this relate to the present-day stuff later in the album? I'm thinking maybe she turns out to be the great-great-great-(etc)-grandmother of Britniy (who we'll meet shortly) and her tragic and highly explosive underground end left a curse or something that protects her descendents and causes people who fuck with them to tend to die similarly. Yeah, we'll be blowing shit up in this story for sure.
3) Something about cowboys and Aliens. Steve owns this piece, although he risks having someone else take the idea if he doesn't get moving (you dang heck that's a threat).
4) the modern ZL was brought into being in a normal, confused, anxious everyguy business type when his return flight from New York flew through the energy beam... no wait, I can't use the term "energy beam". It needs a name... let's call it the grabulon for now. Anyway, there was a bunch of Aliens that were trying to Abduct Steve, and when his plane flew through their grabulon it resulted in Steve being only partially abducted (which results in multiple Steves and I _think_ gives him secret powers, but we haven't precisely nailed down a power that works for the story and is suitably hilarious) and it awakened the ZL. This ZL is somewhat special in that there is a piece of electronics that is his primary ZL power thing (you know, the thing they have to destroy... it's video game cliche #22: The Obvious Weakness). Except it's not totally obvious, like a flashing "shoot here" sign over his ear. But it's guessable. That's all we really need. Anyway, his item is the latest minatiurized version of his "thrilling machine", which is how he got rich. Oh yeah, getting rich was the kickoff step for his inexorable decline (metaphorical and also pretty literal). His origin song ("Take That, The Man") lays that out pretty clearly, going from basic working family guy against the world in verse one, then into ascending rich smart guy in verse two, to complete nut job immortal Zombie Horde driving killing machine at the end. That's probably why that song will have to go late on the album... it reveals a lot and kinda hits a high note emotionally...
5) So after The Partial Abduction and the ZL creation moment, we introduce Britniy. She is a love interest for Steve(s) and her Dad is a defected eastern european (back from when they had to defect). I'm not sure exactly what country her dad is from, or what crazy secret branch of their military he was in, but whichever one had the hard-stabbingest, paranoid, grenade-spamming badasses that's it. He raised Britniy like any good Dad would, which is to say by staging mock government crackdowns and training her on live grenades by age 9. Despite all this, Britniy remains a sweet and relatively well-adjusted young woman, although of course she's also capable of grabbing a duffel bag full of pineapples and a kalashnikoff from dads basement bunker and clearing out a house full of aliens to save Steve. Steve is gone, but she manages to recover one of his fingers, leading her to believe that he has perished. However, during all the mayhem of the Partial Abjuction and Zombie Lord creation, Britniy witnessed a whole bunch of crazy stuff including dead things coming up out of the ground, which leaves her confused and with a lot of questions. When the government types show up to clean up the scene, she escapes. This is a central part of her personality, and serves as her caricature personal conflict: when things get crazy, she moves on. This keeps her from settling in a town, or with a boyfriend, or on a job, etc. All things being two or more things in this story, she also has a subtler and more real set of motivations, but those have to sort of "happen" as the details get fleshed out and she becomes more real. In any case, convinced that she can bring Steve back somehow (and needing to get out of town) she takes off to find someone to raise the dead. Like anyone might, she heads for New Orleans. This theme of the journey to or from something is reprised several times in the story. There is Britniy's paranoid and reckless escape from her home town towards New Orleans, and then a more abstract and perilous escape in a warthog in Wait For It III (I need Steve to lay out the precise details for me... he tends to write a bit more obliquely than I do and I don't want to literalize his lyrics for him... I'm pretty damn sure there's some serious peril and some real fast fuckin' driving and probably huge air). Then there is the Zombie Road Trip, in which some mid-level Zombie wranglers are on a road trip together to a huge rally that the ZL is throwing. Need to figure out what the rally is for... see the ZL motivations below. Then, while they're on the road trip, one of the Zombies breaks into the City of Brains, which is a full-on Dorothy story. The basic idea is that all these guys have a really powerful urge pulling them somewhere. But they don't really know what the hell it's all about, and some of them interpret this pull in really different ways. The most romantic of them sings the City of Brains, which is very much a riff on the Emerald City, Huck Finn, Macon Georgia and the Sun Sphere, etc. It sounds great, but when you get there you may be disappointed.
Will and I had a consult on the ride home yesterday and made the following refinements:
1) When Steve is partially abducted, he splits into three parts:
-"The Steve That Was" is successfully taken aboard the Alien expedition frigate.
-"The Steve That Remained" escapes at the end of Partial Abduction
-One of Steve's fingers, with a ring on it, is physically separated from his hand and remains in his house, for Britniy to find and take to New Orleans
2) "The Steve That Was" eventually becomes the leader of the Alien invasion force, which is coming to recover the finger and the ring. He has no knowledge whatsoever of The Steve That Remained.
3) The Steve That Remained eventually becomes the leader of the Zombie forces
4) The ZL and Steve love interest is the same woman (Britniy)
For the big climax, we have both armies coming after Britniy, who manages to reunite The Steves via the Stinger and the Ring and the Hoodoo. Steve becomes himself again, and since he can appear to either army as their leader, he turns them against each other. Mayhem ensues.
After the big army battle (mutual annihilation), we're left with Steve and Britniy -vs- the ZL, for a climactic mano a mano. The ZL tragically in love with Britniy, but twisted by what he has become, the reunited and redeemed Steve fighting desperately to save what he has only just attained.
Whew. More on the way...
That gives me an idea... i need to do more of those interpretations...
