Breaking the layers down there's some interesting stuff going on. I have decent drum tracks for these songs now and a pretty good rip of the Bass from Monsters, I'm trying to isolate the strings more than anything but there so buried its hard to get a decent rip of it. There's a few things i can try though, not giving up yet.

I like that at 2.50 in The General there is clearly the sound of sampled frog's ribbiting behind the strings part and nobody at all has brought it up lol

Credit to D... from MYGNR he messaged Beltrami about these songs.

As promised, update. Mr Marco Beltrami was kind enough to answer me (love him, became a fan in 2003 with his score for Terminator 3, was amazed Axl hired him when I learnt about it years later). Here is his answer:

"Hi Guillaume,

wow, you really are racking my brain here because it was so long ago, but this is what I remember:

I was hired to do orchestration/arranging for 8 songs. I believe only a few were released on the album that came out a while ago.

every song was distinct.  any connection between songs I was not aware of at the time, so yes they were all separate orchestrations.

yes, I remember a song called “seven” was my favorite but maybe its changed or evolved since then??  I could be wrong, but the two you list here sound a bit reworked from what I remember.

sorry i can’t be more helpful

marco"

I asked him another set of question to fully confirm if Soul Monster is Monsters, hope he will answer.

But I think we could almost already assume The General, and Monsters, were not connected originally.

Almost 100% sure Monsters=Soul Monster now.

Edited 1 minute ago by D..

I'd say The General is the one about child abuse. I always thought it didn't have vocals at that time because when Belltrami worked on it in October of 02 it was an instrumental, but the song being about abuse & being mentioned in January of 01 suggests that it may have had lyrics at that point after all.

Maybe he just had not recorded them yet, or maybe they were already done and he just chose to take the instrumentals to Beltrami. Either way this points to the song existing in the year 2000, which is 2 years earlier than we had proof of before.

I think the real response at the moment is we don't know for certain.

They both have Beltrami work on from the tour intro (that we do know). That could mean they were once one song that has now been split into two, or it could also mean they were always two songs and that they just combined the strings to play as an intro to those gigs back in the day. Now obviously when asked years back what that intro was they said it was The General, they never mentioned Monsters so that would maybe suggest the song was later split after all.

The credits have it registered as The General And Monsters which would imply that they are one song though, but then the 7" is advertised as having The General as a B-Side with no mention of Monsters at all.

So who knows for sure? It's all conflicting hints.

I still would not be surprised if when this 7" appears it doesn't have Monsters on at all. Like I said it's not advertised.

I said this the other day but I think the things the fanbase thought they knew for sure (eg. Me and my Elvis being Soulmonster) actually aren't sure at all.