Seeing how some people's lives are an endless succession of cruelty, poverty and discrimination has always been the most confusing fact of life to me. And thinking about my own role and behaviour in dealing with these people has made it even more confusing. When I traveled through Albania two years ago I saw entire families living on garbage dumps. Their children were playing with self-made trash-toys sucking on their little dirty thumbs. They were born in a pile of trash and they were destined to live their lives in a pile of trash.

For these Roma families there was no such thing as social mobility. These children's lives were basically over, through no fault of their own. Traveling in Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey I saw a scary amount of people with a similar fate. Men with demeaning jobs. Homeless women with their begging children. It seems like every society has a group of people they are discriminating against and feeding on. I was passing them by being a white man with a German passport. Being so tremendously privileged that I could afford quitting my job and traveling the world. But apart from sparing a few coins in change here and there what did I do to improve any of these people's lives?

This contradiction of being deeply moved by these people's fate while not acting on this feeling at all hit me when I was visiting the gallery of Kurdish artist Hadi Ziaoddin in Sanandaj, Iran. The first sculpture I saw was compiled out of a round wire with several figures lined up on it. They were doomed to move around in a circle with their heads tilted to the ground. Although I am not sure if this reflects the work's meaning as intended by the artist, the visual inspired me to write some lyrics to a guitar theme I had come up with a few weeks earlier. This is how the song "Chains" came to life.

In contrast to the production process of the previously published songs "Mine" and "Sand" this time I couldn't start with the recording of the guitars and vocals and thus couldn't build the song from there. When I was finished with the lyrics we had already left Iran and were making our way through Azerbaijan and Georgia. The places we stayed at didn't really allow me to record the song properly and I had to wait until we reached Istanbul to capture the guitars and vocals. To kill time in between I pre-programmed the entire song with Midi-Notes and worked out the song structure and sound effects in that setup.