“I’ve been waiting for so long that my innocence has now become a good reason to fight for this world”
The idea of worlds within worlds has always fascinated me. I don’t know why exactly but it’s something that has captivated me ever since I was a child. This idea can also be applied to the concept of movies and the magic behind the process of making them. That blurry line that gets hard to distinguish between fact and fiction and the infinite possibilities that this offers as a cathartic mirror. The movie within a movie topic not only remains one of my favorites today still but connects deeply with my philosophy and understanding of living. Life is like a beautiful big movie and we are all the protagonists of our own story.
SONGWRITING
Based on this idealized belief, I decided to write a song about my particular experience in how I’ve always perceived and decoded the world around me. A song that would tell the story of my life from a rather naive and innocent perspective, but showing still all the baggage and learning behind each lesson in the journey.
Both melody and lyrics were highly inspired by the song American Pie, which has a similar structure in terms of story-telling. In the lyrics of my song, I speak about my childhood in the first verse and then about my teenage years in the second one, emphasizing the change I experienced when I found out I was gay and how this affected me negatively because of all the bullying situation in high school, going from a happy state into a darker one overnight. Then, the bridges are self-references about my fears and flaws, but also about my strengths and hopes. The choruses are meant to be contradictory and ironic, just like life in itself, and, finally, there’s kind of an epilogue, or an outro, summarizing the spirit and message of the song: never give up on fighting because this life is worth living.
I’m surprised by how positive and happy, even childish. the melody ended up being. That’s not usually me! When I start humming a melody, in order to create a song, this tends to be melancholic and sad, but for this particular song, the melody was very joyful. I don’t really know why that happened, I think I was forcing myself a little to do something different or there might even exist a part of me that is happier than I’ve always thought, who knows! Either way, it remains one of my favorite songs as a songwriter, precisely for being different than usual, and, hopefully, maybe I get to write more positive songs in the future.
Little changes were made in the production for this song since it’s meant to have rather acoustic and minimalist instrumentation. Still, the demo was simpler and the producer added new textures and arpeggios that gave the song the character it needed. What I really like about the production, in this case, is the vocals we recorded. Four months had passed since I quit smoking and this was getting noticeable, not only for my voice but for my self-esteem. I’d say that these are some of the best vocals I’ve ever recorded and one of the best productions from that era. Definitely one of my favorite songs from the album The Ascending, both as production and composition.
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