ALBUM RECOMMENDATION (Evanescence - Fallen)

Evanescence is an amazing band. Their catchy melodies and darkly poetic lyrics mix equally forming the perfect balance between the alternative and mainstream styles. I have always loved that balance in music, I don’t like something that’s extremely commercial or extremely alternative.

I got to know about them thanks to the Daredevil movie as a lot of people, I guess. That Bring Me To Life chorus caught me ever since the first time I heard it. Amy Lee’s voice is extremely beautiful and peculiar at the same time, I love it!

I love their three studio albums but I think the first one is the best, it’s a classic. This was one of the first albums I ever bought, coinciding with my first teenage years and it brings me good memories despite having bad times in high school. 

And I also love each and every song of the album, something that’s unusual when you first listen to a whole album.

Favorite songs: Bring Me To Life, My Immortal, Everybody’s Fool, Tourniquet, and Hello.

I'LL BE THERE FOR YOU

“It can’t rain all the time”

SONGWRITING

June 2012. I woke up at about 4 a.m. from a nightmare I don’t remember. I was going through a very difficult time back then because I was in love with a guy who treated me like shit, and the saddest part is that it wasn’t the first time that someone I was in love with treated me like that. It felt as if the story was repeating itself and I couldn’t do anything else but abandon myself into resignation. I felt empty and numb, and that’s how the first word came: “Nothingness”. With those 3 syllables came a melody and with that melody some rhymes. I remember that it somehow felt like pushing myself in a fake way, like being forced from that nothingness into the desire of having the willingness to keep going. I also remember that I almost shed a tear as I was writing the chorus and that’s how the lyrics of the chorus were conceived too. 

Then, while writing the second part of the song, I realized the need of turning the meaning of the song around, because it was too depressing and I needed to give a message of hope at the end. This is something that has happened with most of the songs in the album, that’s why the choruses have not the exact same lyrics, they change in order to show an evolution along with the structure of the song.

This was also one of the few songs on the album that was entirely written at a time with the guitar (Most of the other songs were constructed like a puzzle of diverse melodies that I had kept over the years).

PRODUCTION

I’ll be there for you was the first song that I showed to my producer when we first met. Though the idea and the structure of the song were pretty clear, some things needed to be changed. 

First of all, the demo of the song was recorded with the guitar and my voice only and there were not any bar measurements because I didn’t even know what that was when I began so, once I knew more about it, I tried to adapt the original structure with bars and that’s why this is the only song that doesn’t follow the traditional 4/4 structure.

Then, we also changed the original introductory arpeggio because it didn’t fit with the chords and, finally, I changed some parts of the lyrics: The “I can’t even feel my skin” line said originally something like “I am feeling mental suicidal” and the “I’ll be there for you” line said, “I’m here for you”. It just felt too depressive and self-focused so that’s why I changed the meaning of the second part of the song, in which I am speaking to some other person because, although the song is about my inner traumas and how not everything depends on oneself’s attitude, I wanted to transmit this idea that you can turn your feelings and thoughts around and try to help other people who have been through the same similar stuff that you once were. This is what the song is about: forgiveness and helping other people.

Musically, we added some curious instruments in this one: The pizzicato part and the theremin at the end were in honor of two of my favorite songs: Lo Bueno Queda by Ainhoa (the song of my life) and A song to say goodbye by Placebo. I personally love the unique touch these instruments give to the song.

Album Preview

Here’s the link to my new Youtube channel where you can find an album preview video with 20 seconds of each song. Don’t hesitate to sub!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsnwDnBkI9E2yhbh69D_SNA

Movie References

As I explained in my latest post, each song is gonna be related to an album, but I am also going to relate them to movies, cause we get inspiration from everywhere and cinema is one of my biggest passions.

The thesis of a movie (or what we refer to in Spanish as idea temática or controladora) is like the moral of a fairy tale and it's usually related to the purpose of the main character. At the end of the movie, we are supposed to learn something about what we have just watched, that sensation that’s left inside of us after we finish the movie when this one has really touched or inspired us… We charge lots of ideals and valuables with positive or negative backgrounds and then apply them to the characters and the whole universe of the movie. The most important thing about this is not that the characters or the background of the story are represented as banal ideation of good or evil (that’s always subjective), the most important thing is that these characters and their actions are coherent.

I believe, then, that if movies have a thesis, songs have them as well. Everything has a meaning as art creation and we’re always communicating ideas, so we are somehow giving a lecture, whether we like it or not. 

My purpose is to create diverse tribute videos of some movies with each song, relating the music and the lyrics of the songs with the thesis of these movies, in order to promote the songs with visual content.

CULT MOVIES

I’ve been the biggest fan of horror movies since I watched Scream when I was a child. That was the first step that led me to get to know a new genre that can’t be considered one in itself: the cult movie.

A cult movie is a film that gets recognition beyond the purpose of simply earning money and doing well at theaters. It is a movie that does not necessarily have to connect with everyone, but one that connects deeply with a certain group of people, creating a fanbase strong enough for that group to continue loving and worshipping the movie after a lot of years have passed by. That’s why it is difficult to determine what a cult movie is. Because, once again, it is something subjective. But it can be affirmed that they are usually different, with a unique story and visually attractive, belonging most of the time to the fantasy genre. To me, the clearest example of a cult movie is Donnie Darko and one of my favorites as well.

Here’s a list of the movies I’m going to use for the videos:

• DONNIE DARKO
• THE CROW
• CUBE
• BLACK SWAN
• 500 DAYS OF SUMMER
• HIGH TENSION (SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE)
• SAW
• FIGHT CLUB
• RUN LOLA RUN
• NEVER LET ME GO
• AMERICAN BEAUTY
• MAGNOLIA
• TRUMAN SHOW

Musical References

What would be of artists without references? We are constantly influencing people and being influenced at the same time, and that is the beautiful part of building our identity in art. We can admire something or someone so much that we wish we could get to do the same great things someday, and the most important thing is that we have the freedom of choice, and it is that choice that will shape our artistic personality. 

FEMININE ROCK

Finding your own artistic personality can be hard and it depends on lots of factors. In my case, everything began with the Spanish singer Ainhoa, a girl who won a talent reality show against all odds, even against the leaders of the show and the organization. To summarize the story, she was given a very difficult song being expected to fail just before the grand final, but she nailed her live performance and got to win. Her epic performance and consequent victory had a great impact on my life. It made me believe that justice wins in the end and that things can change with effort. The thing is that she was into singers like Alanis Morissette or Anouk, and that’s how I started to become interested in female rock music. 

Thanks to her I got to know amazing singers and bands led by women such as Garbage, The Cranberries, Evanescence, Avril Lavigne, PJ Harvey, Juliette and the Licks, and Alanis Morissette or Anouk as I mentioned before.

¿Who said that women were the weak gender? I don’t think so. Women are more powerful than we believe and, especially in music, they have very strong power and sensitiveness to communicate feelings and emotions. I have always loved how a woman can transmit so much with her voice and how that voice can be sweet or angry depending on the moment. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I have never been completely fond of my own voice.  

I will speak more concretely about all of my musical references as I go publishing each song, which is gonna be related to one of my favorite albums ever from my favorite artists.

About the album (Faith In Chaos)

Faith and chaos may seem opposite concepts but, the truth is, we deal with both of them in our day-to-day lives. To me, faith represents everything we cling to in order to keep on moving forward. It represents the beliefs that we all have. No matter if you’re a believer, agnostic, or atheist, believing only in facts is a belief in itself. On the other hand, chaos is about everything we can’t control, our frustration and pain, a representation of the unknown. We deal with these two contradictory ideas inevitably and, though we may act from lots of different angles and perspectives to face the world, none of us can’t escape this intrinsic duality.

Faith in chaos contains 13 tracks of an alternative pop/rocker music style. The number 13 gets an ironic meaning here: having faith in something you're not supposed to, believing in the impossible, turning bad luck into just a superstition. The thirteenth song gives the album its title and summarizes best its spirit: disordered ideas mixed together trying to make sense somehow.

Referring to the lyrics, I think that they are very important in this album. I’m not an English native speaker, so writing in English has been an amazing challenge that I’ve enjoyed a lot since most of the music I listen to is made by American and British bands and singers. Thematically, the lyrics of this album are not about love. I mean, we are always speaking about love in music and, probably, this album is more about love than what I think but, in my opinion, nowadays we tend to idealize the idea of love and romanticism when there are terrible things happening in the world right in front of our eyes and we tend or try to ignore them. I believe that we should focus more on fixing our shit before declaring love so easily to others. So that’s why this album is more vindictive and a little philosophical too, I would say. It’s about existentialism, social criticism, and overcoming, always told from my personal point of view, obviously. It’s also a little selfish and self-deprecating since there are no odes, all of the songs are about my experiences and my relationship with myself. 

Speaking about the music, there are at least four different styles in it. We can find melancholic mid-tempos in songs such as Catharsis or Numbness.  We can also find two rock ballads: The Quest!on and I’ll Be There For You. Then there is an angry and vindictive pop/rocker style with songs like The Wall, Schizophrenic Antichrist, Leviathan, Game Over, Mad in Love, and The Difference. And finally, there’s a brighter futuristic pop/rock that summarizes the spirit of the album with songs like Fiction of Truth, Straight in Circles Upside Down, and Faith in Chaos. 

The production (instruments, mix, master…) has been made by Marcel Sabater with the program Logic and midi files, taking into consideration the fact that I don’t have a band with whom to record real instruments. All of the singing and the composition work (chords, lyrics, melodies) have been made by me.

About the project (Changing direction)

“When everything seems just a lie

 And you get lost into the night

 When life becomes an uphill climb

 That’s right when you have to try”

Faith in Chaos was an unconscious desire that became more and more feasible in my mind as I started to let go of the fear within. Fear of losing everything I had fought for before I suffered the psychotic break; fear of losing my family, my life in Barcelona, and, among everything, fear of losing my identity at any level, but… how can you lose something that you have already lost, something that has never belonged to you? How can you lose a life based on lies? How can you lose yourself when it’s you the one who needs to be found? You end up reaching a point in which you realize how you have been wrongly clinging to an illusion whose only valuables left are traces of a yesterday that was never as beautiful as you idealized. You realize how you need to start fighting for recovering yourself and your identity, about how you need to fight for bringing into light the inner voice that some other people have been trying to restrain.

After finishing my cinema studies, I knew I wanted to do something different. I had lots of disordered pieces of lyrics and melodies and my purpose was to learn more about how to produce music, in order to make some demos. Knowing I wouldn't manage well being in a class with a group of people since I had too many traumas from when I was bullied in high school, I decided to search on the Internet for music production private lessons. I didn’t really stop to look carefully because I just wanted to give it a try, so I randomly chose one of the options that appeared on the web, wrote an email to that person, and arranged an appointment. We met and I showed him the demo of a song that was called I’m here for you back then. He found it very interesting and a few days later he emailed me back saying that he thought it was a great song and that we should try to produce it professionally.

It was a matter of time to put in order the pieces of the puzzle.

About my story

My name is Miguel. I was born in a little town in the south of Catalonia, Spain, on the 20th of June 1990. I have always loved art, especially music and cinema. Art was my escape when I was a child, my particular way of understanding a reality that didn't seem appealing to me at first sight. Cinema, more concretely, was my first passion and what I thought would be my ideal future job, but everything changed when I was a teenager. Music started to take a very important place in my heart unconsciously when I found out I was gay. My teenage years were hell, I was bullied in high school and I started to become more and more isolated as years were passing by. I also became addicted to pott to escape that reality I didn't understand, which had turned completely unbearable back then. When I finished high school, I broke away from my town and headed to Barcelona, thinking everything would change overnight but I was damn wrong. I was studying my first year at the cinema school when I had to suddenly struggle with a psychotic break that completely paralyzed my life and the identity I had built until then. My life was worse than hell, there was no point, but I continued forward as I had always done. After a whole year locked at home, trying to figure out what was happening inside of me, I returned to Barcelona to finish my studies, but although cinema had been my passion as a child and what everyone had designed for me, I just felt like I wasn't going the right way so, when I finished my degree, I started to produce music, my own music. Ever since that and after about 14 years in a row of frustration and general unhappiness, I have had the feeling that there's a light at the end of the tunnel. I may not be the best singer, I may not be taking the easy way, and people may not be fond of what I'm doing, but there's no doubt that music has helped me to balance my mind and my heart and this is the most important thing to me right now.