Being heavy metal, the fact that Yngwie solos have any groove at all is an achievement. The fact that the groove is so precise for being insanely fast and completely improvised is a minor miracle. The fact that it's all done with two scale positions and never sounds boring or repetitive, well, that's why the rest of us drive Tauruses.

But such is the wonder of Yngwie's playing. Now Your Ships Are Burned was the first Yngwie song I ever heard, taped off the radio (airplay? Yngwie?) in high school. At the time I was simply mystified by its crushingly virtuosic display of technique. The first lick in particular grabbed my attention unlike any Yngwie has recorded since, and I worked on it for years, off and on. Gradually, like a fine wine, its musicality became the real hook. The swoopy bends, the distinctive phrasing -- almost every lick in the solo is a call or response to the ones around it. As a neoclassical piece, it's really somewhat progressive. It's filled with odd, angular riffs and punctuated unpredictably with mind-boggling stop-time runs. It's more the soundtrack to an urban gunfight than the big-screen adaptation of Beowulf to which better-known Yngwie tracks like Far Beyond The Sun seemingly aspire.

Even as my ability improved over the years, I stayed away from this one, because sometimes it's cool not to know how they saw the woman in half. For this article I finally sat down and worked out the remaining mysteries. In so doing I lost a bit of the illusion, but gained an even deeper appreciation for the subtlety of the magic.