Guitarist Chris Caffery (Savatage, Trans-Siberian Orchestra) continues to take a track-by-track look at his 2004 solo album, Faces. He offers an inside look at the song "Life, Crazy Life" below.

Caffery: "'Life, Crazy Life' kinda picked up where 'Music Man' left off. At this point in the writing I was just having fun. Almost every day another song would come out. On the weekends I was leaving the city with my cat Haley. She was only a baby then. Hard to believe she will be 15 this year! We headed to my home upstate and in the very studio room that I work now I would write at night. I had a small digital recorder at this location. I'd formulate a rough drum beat and some riffs. Sunday night when I returned to the city I'd start to complete the ideas. A tremendous amount of the writing that I've done has happened in the house that I'm at now. Jon Oliva was even living here for a while when we first got Butcher signed and I know for sure we wrote 'Iraq Attack' here. There was a song called 'Psycho' that I have a demo of somewhere that was written here as well. There were a few others. After this solo music is completed maybe we can do a little Butcher journey...

Anyhoo... this song had no hidden or special meanings the lyrics kinda just tell things how they were and are. Life is crazy and you never do win the race 'til you cross the finish line. I know many of us have been depressed in our lives and I've even had friends that have taken theirs because of this. You don't win the race without crossing the finish line...you can't cross the line if you aren't in the race...

I know at this time I was very fortunate to have a lot of friends around me. My roommate Igor and my landlords brother who were all in this funny house we had in Astoria...at this time we were only a year or so separated from 9-11. My landlords brother had an apartment in the basement of the house. He was a history teacher. Really smart guy. He was Greek. Astoria, NY has one of the largest Greek populations outside of Greece in the world. I think only Australia has more. I'd visit him in the morning for Greek iced coffee which was so amazing! We would watch the Greek and Middle Eastern news channels. It was here that I began to get the real understanding about just how twisted government and the media can be. Not saying we were being lied to, we just didn't see what was actually going on! We literally did not see the realities a lot of the times on the news in America. At this time I started to write songs about this war. About war in general. This was along with my songs about my life and life in general. In time it was becoming clear that I had two distinct albums forming. However I was getting so anxious for people to hear the music I made one small mistake and that was releasing too much of the God Damn War CD with Faces.

This was a mistake for two reasons....Faces was a very long cd...the critics had almost too much to listen to with just that. So by adding more it was a little tiring for some of them. When I finally released the war material as a full length cd called "Warped" ', although it contained 40 minutes of new material...the critics never really treated it as a new record. That cd is still very relevant today. The lyrics and the messages. Some of the characters in the war have changed since 9-11 but it's the same war."

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