Right now I am feeling as if millions of thoughts and feelings were flowing in a chaotic way within myself, allowing to see just a little crack of so much light I cannot glimpse, of so much truth I cannot embrace, of so much beauty I cannot stand... And it's only up to me to bring back every lived experience to the right place they belong, bringing back together the pieces of a broken time which are part of the perfect equation between reality and imperfection.
I got to know about Sia's amazing talent recently. I had only heard her “Breathe me” song because it sounded in the background of one of those anti-bullying videos where the young kids tell their bullying stories with pieces of paper. I always thought that that song was wonderful but I barely knew anything about the artist. Later, when she became very popular, I wasn’t very interested in her at first, although the idea of hiding her face with her hair seemed appealing to me. It wasn’t until she released her last album and the Alive single that I started to really pay attention to her music. I felt extremely related to that song and I highly recommend its lyric video on youtube. After that, I started to look for information about her on the Internet and I was surprised by the great number of songs and albums she had released before. So far, I have only listened to this last album but I hope I can get to discover more from her because I find her music very interesting. This last album is very catchy and the lyrics have great messages about strength and overcoming. You can feel by her music that she’s a very sensitive person who has been through a lot of pain. She’s also very creative and her voice is unique, I love the way it cracks.
Favorite songs: Bird Set Free, Alive, Move Your Body, Unstoppable, Footprints. and Broken Glass.
October 2013. This song came up as an experiment. I had already started the music production private lessons back then and I needed to put some ideas in order. I had had the melody of the chorus running in my head for a long time and the idea of starting the song with the word “welcome” in the first line so that I could suddenly break the harmony of this invitation in the second line right after. Those two basic ideas were crucial to developing the rest of the song. Later, I added the metaphor of the circles as a way of showing that there are infinite points of view and perspectives and that we can’t simply divide things into two categories as we usually tend to do. The melody of the beginning of the verse was inspired by a song called La Turmis, from the first album of the Spanish band Dover, which became very popular in the nineties. The structure of the chords, which is repeated along with the whole song except for the break after the second chorus, was a pretty random and spontaneous choice. Most of the songs in this album have similar chord structures, taking into account that I don’t know much about playing the guitar yet. Besides, writing the lyrics and melody first and adding the chords later makes it hard for me to explore new and unusual chords. But I continue learning and I hope I get to know different ways of writing songs in the future, so they don't end up being repetitive structurally and melodically.
PRODUCTION
For this song, the producer asked me to add a third chorus (the original demo had only 2 choruses). That consequently meant a change in the lyrics so that the idea of showing an evolution along the song would remain coherent. In fact, this is probably one of the songs in the album that best shows this concept: none of the choruses has the same lyrics but they do keep similar structures in order to turn the negative meaning of the beginning around and make it positive at the end of the song. To me, this song has also similarities in the lyrics with the movie script structure theory of Syd Field and its turning points. Just like in a movie, I’m telling a story. There's a narrator, which is the singing voice in this case, and also the main character, which is the person the song is addressed to. As the lyrics of the song advance, we enter into the extraordinary world from the ordinary world and, once the story goes from being narrated personally to turning into the imperative mode, these two ideas get reunited together in the third chorus, showing new learning and perspective and turning its whole meaning around. So, I guess that this is somehow my personal way of wanting to show the world how art and reality get often mixed up, how they influence one another. and how fiction and fact can be hard to distinguish sometimes. If I had to go further, I could even say that this song is a message that I am sending to a future version of myself in a different time and space, but that would be a lot harder to explain.
Concerning the instrumental, this has been made by the producer, mostly. Both the introductory bass riff and the electric guitar solo after the second chorus are composed by him and I personally think they fit in very well with the song.
I must confess that I have never been a very big fan of this movie. Not because I find it bad in general terms, but because I think it had the potential to be amazing, and for some reason that didn't happen in the end. One of those reasons is that, in my opinion, the script focuses too much on the revenge story instead of the love story, which ends up being secondary even though the thesis and the final line seem to be about this last one. I think that the vengeance story occupies too many scenes and it ends up being repetitive having to see each of the vile characters killed one by one. Maybe focusing a little more on the story of the young girl who was friends with the main character and his girlfriend or even adding an entirely new subplot would have made a significant difference. However, it can’t be denied that there’s an aura of mystery around the whole movie and, after all these years, it still has an enchanting and unique aesthetic. The gothic look of the movie is amazing and it has nothing to envy the films nowadays. Besides, the fact that the main actor died while shooting the film makes his last appearance on screen legendary and he will remain immortal thanks to that. So, despite some flaws in the script, this is still a great cult movie to be recommended.
I mainly chose this movie to be accompanied by the “I’ll Be There For You” song because the lyrics were directly inspired by one of the lines of the dialogue from the script, which reproduces the very same words: the memorable “it can’t rain all the time” line which was translated in Spanish as something like “it can’t rain forever” or “it can’t rain eternally”. I remember I was emotionally touched when I first heard this line in the movie and it remains one of my favorite scenes in it.
Besides, rainy weather has always been something appealing to me, especially since I started to go through dark times in high school. I remember listening to “All is full of love” by Björk or watching the movie Stigmata while the rain was falling out there and feeling comfortable with the cloudy sky and the sound of the raindrops. Do you remember the amazing song “I’m only happy when it rains” by Garbage? That’s totally me! I guess that's because I like to believe that, no matter how sad or dark life gets sometimes, the rain is a reminder that the sun will rise up again someday. And we need to be reminded that, in order to shine, there's gotta be darkness too.
THESIS OF THE MOVIE
I would say that there are two theses in this case. Both of them can be extracted from the very same words written in the script. One of them could be the earlier mentioned “It can’t rain all the time”, meaning that nothing’s eternal: pain will fade away in the end and we need to learn how to embrace it in order to overcome it. On the other hand, the other thesis could be the final line of the movie, which is spoken by the young girl who also introduces us to the story in the opening scene: “If people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. BUILDINGS BURN; PEOPLE DIE, BUT REAL LOVE IS FOREVER.
