My Arms, Your Hearse

It was recorded in August and September 1997 at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, produced by Fredrik Nordstrom, the band and Anders Friden; Nordstrom also plays the Hammond organ on "Epilogue". It is the first album with the drummer Martin Lopez, who answered a newspaper advertisement and soon brought in his friend Martin Mendez. Mendez had no time to learn the bass parts, so Mikael Akerfeldt played all of them on this recording. Where every song on Morningrise ran past ten minutes, every song here runs under it. The lyrics were all written before the music. They follow the ghost of a man who cannot accept that he is dead, unable to reach the people he loved and left in a limbo that does not end; each song closes on the word that titles the next, and the words of "Epilogue" end on "prologue", closing the circle. The running order here is the 1998 pressing's (Candlelight, CANDLE25) and does not include the two covers the 2000 reissue added.