Bone Palace Ballet

Untitled

Bone Palace Ballet is Chiodos' second full-length album, which was released September 13, 2007.

During the March 31st Taste of Chaos show in Detroit, Michigan, the band announced that their new album is going to be called Bone Palace Ballet.

At various shows on the Rockstar Taste of Chaos tour, Chiodos played a song off the new album and introduced it as "I'm Naming My Kids Beer One and Beer Two". Lead guitarist Jason Hale later said in an interview that it was not the actual title and that the song had yet to be named.

On April 19th, 2007, a link to the studio demo of the untitled song played during the Rockstar Taste of Chaos tour was posted on Chiodos' official fansite message board, along with a fifty second clip of another demo entitled "Lexington." The links were subsequently removed from the message board by the board's administrators. Shortly after the demos appeared, Chiodos posted a stream of the untitled demo on their MySpace page.

On June 1, 2007, Chiodos posted a MySpace bulletin containing lyrics to the untitled demo, and the official name of the song; "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys."

Another new song had the working title "The $3,000 Song". Chiodos was calling it that because their label, Equal Vision Records rented a studio for them to work in (with a total cost of about $3000) and it was the only song they wrote in the eight days they were there.

On August 27, 2007, a poorly mastered copy of the album was leaked to the internet, 8 days before the official release date.

Following the album's release, it debuted at number five on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart, selling about 39,000 copies in its first week. As of 2008 the album has sold 180,000 copies clearly exceeding sales of the band's debut All's Well That Ends Well.

The album, according to some listeners, expirements a little in the genres of Progressive metal and even a little in Neo-Classical Rock.

Track listing

1. "Is It Progression If a Cannibal Uses a Fork?" - 3:26
2. "Lexington (Joey Pea-Pot with a Monkey Face)" - 5:22
3. "Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered" - 3:28
4. "A Letter from Janelle" - 3:16
5. "I Didn't Say I Was Powerful, I Said I Was a Wizard" - 4:13
6. "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys" - 3:23
7. "Life Is a Perception of Your Own Reality" - 3:46
8. "If I Cut My Hair, Hawaii Will Sink" - 2:23
9. "Intensity in Ten Cities" - 4:34
10. "The Undertaker's Thirst for Revenge Is Unquenchable (The Final Battle)" - 4:43

Cut Songs/Demos

1. "Pirates and Rebels"
2. "We Swam Home from Auschwitz the Day We Lost Kailey Cost"

There are three other unknown tracks that will be recorded for the upcoming DVD.

Personnel

• Craig Owens: Vocals
• Jason Hale: Lead Guitars
• Pat McManahan: Rhythm Guitars
• Bradley Bell: Keyboards, Piano, Synthesizer, Organ
• Matt Goddard: Bass
• Derrick Frost: Drums, Percussion

Trivia

• "I Didn't Say I Was Powerful, I Said I Was a Wizard" was originally entitled "A Final Opinion is of Less Value Than an Appreciation of and Tolerance for Obscurity" which are also lyrics to the second part of the chorus.

• "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys" is deeply dependent on lines from Charles Bukowski's poem "I'm in Love". These lines include: "...I dropped all my lovers. I stood up [in a cafe] and screamed I'M IN LOVE" along with "...through the eyes: hatred, centuries deep and true. I was wrong [and] graceless and sick. All the things I had learned had been wasted. There was no living creature as foul as I and all my poems were false."

• The title "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys" is taken from Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut

• Nick Martin from the band Underminded guest vocals on tracks 3 and 10.

• Jesse Korman from the band The Number 12 Looks Like You provided guest vocals on tracks 1 and 3.

• Chiodos named their 2007 album "Bone Palace Ballet" after Bukowski's posthumous book of poems of the same name.

• The line "I'm not the one that you want, I'll only let you down" from the song "Intensity In Ten Cities" is taken from Bob Dylan's song "It Ain't Me Babe."

• "Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered" is phrase commonly said by Mad Money host Jim Cramer.

• The line "And all the worlds a stage" in "The Undertaker's Thirst For Revenge Is Unquenchable (The Final Battle)" is taken from William Shakespeare's play As You Like It

• The Line "Did my heart love until now? Cause I Feel As Though I've never seen beauty till this night" in " Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered" is taken from William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet

• The line within the chorus of "Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered" that reads "we were infinite for a moment" could possibly be an allusion to The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, in which several other titles are mentioned and discussed, including Shakespeare. The theme of the main character's feeling of "infinite" is prominent throughout the novel.

• The title "Intensity in Ten Cities" is a quote from Mike Myers' character Wayne Campbell in the movie Wayne's World.

• In the Bone Palace Ballet lyric book, under the track "Bulls Make Money, Bears Make Money, Pigs Get Slaughtered", the words "across the ocean/ hear her screams" appear, despite being nowhere in the song. These words are the last words in a demo (dubbed the "Kailey Cost Demo") for one of the five songs that did not make it to the album.

• "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys" was originally titled "Teeth the Size of Piano Keys and Bass Strings for Hair", but according to Craig Owens "our shit's too long anyways", so it was cut down to the final title.

• The title "If I Cut My Hair, Hawaii Will Sink" was named when Matt Goddard drunkenly spoke the words to the other band members.

• The album art for "Bone Palace Ballet" references Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait.

• "A Letter From Janelle" is from letters of quotes that a woman named Janelle would send Craig Owens. The lyrics are made up of one particular letter that he would review in times of distress.