The Making of "I'll Be at That Point"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 9/6/2020

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 4/17/2020 and 6/20/2020

Written March 2021

The song has pretty straightforward lyrics that deal with an interaction in a dream about religion and its emotional implications for me. 

I made a demo of the song in early 2021, but I’m not sure why I did so, because the demo was extremely similar to the final song. I was submitting the demo for a school project because my professor wanted a portfolio of creative works that I’d done outside of class. But I just learned that there’s no point in making sloppy “demos” if the final version isn’t that hard to make. This song was fairly easy to make because of no collaborations, but it was still difficult to get the vocals right -- about 5 or 6 vocal sessions in, I finally got one that was acceptable. 

 

The Making of "But When I Know Who I Am"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 11/30/2020

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 12/9/2019 and 9/30/2020

Written December 2020/March 2021

This song was inspired by a dream where I saw a boy from my elementary school (who inexplicably appears in my dreams a lot) as if we’d gone to the same school again. In some strange dream situation, I’d come back from the future to prevent him from dying. He was sitting in a small, empty room in the school, and I knew that he was going to stay there forever and die if I didn’t help him. I couldn’t think of anything to tell him to make him leave except to make a false love confession. He jumped up and started following me around school as I was just doing a bunch of people’s errands. 

The two lines that came from dreams were “And the blood came rush before me, / But we always knew our lines” and “But when I know who I am / There are so many things to add”. These are obviously both lines packed with meaning... I carefully found a way to weave them into the narrative about the boy from elementary school. The title lyric of the song was heard in a dream in which I was listening to one of my favorite albums from my early teen days, Sondre Lerche’s Heartbeat Radio. However, I later realized that the song he was singing was not real... even though it sounded extremely similar to that album’s style. 

I set out to make something as similar to Heartbeat Radio as I could. My friend Tobias makes electronic music that I really admire, under the name Carndye. I showed him “I Cannot Let You Go” by Sondre Lerche, along with my demo. In two amazingly creative sessions, we crafted the instrumental for the song that somehow turned out exactly how I wanted it.

 

The Making of "Poor Face"

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 5/18/2020

Written June 2020

I learned about deepfakes in my computer science class during my senior year of HS and was absolutely mortified by the concept of them. Of course, soon enough, I was having nightmares about how deepfakes could be used for evil purposes. I dreamed that my family and I were watching a TV trial about a teacher whose identity was defaced by a repulsive deepfake. In the same dream, I heard a song that went “Light crying out from the moon”. It was hard to write the song to convey the meaning of the dream, but not get too into the disturbing details. 

This was perhaps the first song to be finished completely, and one of the easiest to make, because it didn’t involve any collaborations. The vocal ending was somewhat improvised, being written and recorded right on the spot. The high note was a struggle but people say that they really liked that part so I guess it’s fine. 

 

The Making of "Bodies Fall Apart"

Lyrics inspired by 2 dreams from 5/13/2020 and 6/22/2020

Music inspired by 3 dreams from 3/9/2018, 11/10/2019, 12/21/2019

Written June 2020

I had ideas to make “Bodies Fall Apart” either rock or electronic-influenced, but I ended up settling on indie/experimental rock. “Touching and mutilating bodies, insane!” was a lyric I came up with all the way back in 2018 that I somehow remembered. “There’s something about the way he moves that made him fall apart” was a dream-lyric that I knew I had to incorporate in some kind of slower ending section. 

The lyrics were inspired by the events of a handful of dreams in which bodies were weirdly morphing. A memorable one was where I found a drawer in my old house that had two dolls realistically modeled after me and my brother when we were very young -- but when I tried to pick up the dolls, they started melting in my hands as if they were made of slime. The lyrics were difficult to write because of how weird it was to convey these dreams through the lyrics. I’m sure they still come across as very cryptic and absurd, despite my several rewrites. 

After making a chaotic demo with no real energy and completely out-of-sync guitar tracks, I used that as a starting point for how to improve for the final version. Being mostly a self-produced song, making the core parts was relatively easy. I finished most of the song in mid-2021, being one of the first things I did for the album. However, the difficult part was the whistling. I asked what seemed like all my friends if they knew how to whistle, and they all either said they couldn’t whistle or just bailed on me/forgot about my request. Finally, in Spring 2022, I found some friends who were eagerly willing to whistle on the spot - three friends, in fact. “Bodies Fall Apart” was, I think, the first song I started recording and the last song I finished recording. 

The Making of "Flower"

Lyrics inspired by a dream from 5/12/2020

Written June 2020

When recording “Cabin”, I randomly edited the piano riff backwards, and realized that it could make another song. It was inspired by a dream about being in a stadium for some event, and sitting next to a girl whom I didn’t know anything about, except that her name was May and we’d both gone through some kind of assault experience. Chaos started happening on the stage as some men revealed that our assaulters were in the audience, and people were screaming and running out of the stadium. I guided the girl outside to help her out. She seemed depressed that the event had been disrupted and I tried to offer her a flower, but she rejected it.

I started to explore the city with my new friend, first going to my middle school, where we seemingly trespassed into some areas, but were allowed by a kind custodian to wander. Then we went to the museum where my mom works at and ended up in the staff area. Instead of going to the right exhibit, the girl wandered off into an unfinished, mysterious room that was off-limits; she got scolded by a woman who mistakenly called her “Blossom”. 

The dream was very chaotic, and incoherent at times; but I find it fascinating how the different places we explored represented the ways in which that girl was violated in her experiences, and the flower could have represented lost innocence.

I reached out to Joey again for the piano because he’d already made “Cabin” with me, so I should also make the song’s sequel with him. While it was extremely difficult to play the piano and also edit the piano to get the precise tempo (in retrospect, I could’ve done this song myself to make it way less complicated), I really appreciated Joey’s creative contributions; he composed the piano bass and gave other suggestions. The vocals were hard to record, taking at least 5 vocal recording sessions. 

The Making of "I'm Always Watching You 3"

Lyrics inspired by several different dreams

Music inspired by a dream from 4/11/2020

Written April 2020/June 2020

After the release of Lowercase in April 2020, I started to seriously spend more time writing the dream album. For those past few years, Sondre Lerche’s Pleasure (2017) was an extremely inspirational album for me. His song “I’m Always Watching You” is a confessional song about stalkerish behaviors. He also released a more mellow version of the song titled “I’m Always Watching You Too” that he said came to him in a dream. Of course, I dreamed about a third part to this song series that was fast-paced electropop for some reason, and had the lyrics “I want it so bad, but I don’t need it so fast”. 

At that time, I was having an absurd amount of dreams about finding someone’s “secret” social media accounts. I wrote the lyrics with a similar ironic and self-hating tone to Lerche’s song. So of course, don’t take the lyrics to this song literally. I also felt like experimenting with some new guitar chords, so I decided to make the first half of the song on guitar, and the second half more similar to the electropop song I heard in the dream. 

I first made a demo of the song in GarageBand that was not too far off from my vision of the song, except it was just cheaply produced. My friend Ramiel expressed interest in producing the song, so I let them try it. However, the first versions of the song didn’t really match my vision for it; they diverged from my demo and assumed that I’d want a more lowkey art pop song instead of the intense electropop from my dream. It took a lot of back-and-forth communication about how I wanted the synths to sound, and how the melody should go, to finally get a version of this song that I was pleased with. By the end, I’m very pleased with how much this song matches my vision, and I’m glad we spent as much time and effort on it as we did. 

The Making of "Cabin"

Music inspired by a dream from 7/28/2019

Written November 2019

The piano melody for “Cabin” came to me in a dream that took place in a cabin at a campsite. I wrote a poem that was a stream of the first words that came to mind as I hummed the “cabin piano theme”. The lyrics were abstract thoughts instead of a narrative, so I almost considered scrapping the lyrics because they didn’t fit the album concept -- but I was so proud of the lyrics that I decided to keep them on the album. 

I also have a theory that the main piano riff on “Cabin” was my dream brain’s warped representation of “Apartments Exterior” from the soundtrack of Yume 2kki, a game I was playing a lot at the time. Ironically, the game is also about exploring a dream. 

I recorded and released a demo of “Cabin” in late 2019, quite a while before the album would get finished. When making the final version in early 2022, I wanted my friend Joey to collaborate on the song. He’s a very talented keyboardist, and has access to different pianos and keyboards. I’m not super happy with how it turned out, as it sounds quite lo-fi, and I could’ve modified the lyrics. But a lot of people say they liked it, and no one’s complained yet that the demo was better, so that’s good. 

Sleep Through the Quiet Lust: Conceptualizing the Album

This is the first in a series of posts where I will discuss the making of my 4th album. Here are links to the rest of the posts, where I discuss the process of writing and making each song:

The Making of "Cabin"

The Making of "I'm Always Watching You 3"

The Making of "Flower"

The Making of "Bodies Fall Apart"

The Making of "Poor Face"

The Making of "But When I Know Who I Am"

The Making of "I'll Be at That Point"

The Making of “Airpush Down the Stairs”

The Making of “Sleep Through the Quiet Lust”

The Making of “Theme to Being Stuck in a Dream”

The Making of “Only a Hunter”

The Making of “Hinman Park”

The Making of “June 18th”

The Making of "Gazing"

The album Sleep Through the Quiet Lust is the sequel to my first album from 2019, Requirements For Sleep. I hesitated to make music and release it because I was extremely unconfident in my abilities, but I got motivated to teach myself guitar and write songs. I had a lot of song ideas from my dreams, so I decided my first album would be a compilation of dream songs. Requirements For Sleep was an ambitious album idea that I ended up recording in only 2 weeks at age 17, with only one month of experience playing guitar. Some were imaginary songs by my favorite artists that I dreamed about them singing, like “Ekans” being a dreamt-up Sondre Lerche song, “Smart” being a dreamt-up Kate Bush song, and “Trumpet Hollow School” being an imaginary Talking Heads song. I was quite embarrassed to release something that felt so unfinished and unrealized, but some very sweet comments from my friends encouraged me to keep going. 

I still had dozens of dream songs ideas, so as early as one month after the release of Requirements For Sleep, I just knew I had to make a sequel. I started to keep a dream journal in late 2019 where I wrote about every single night’s dream in as much detail as possible. I had important, emotionally significant events from my dreams that I needed to write songs about, so this time, the lyrics of the album would be inspired by the narrative events of the dreams. 

In August 2019, I wrote my first song for the dream album, “We’ve Set Up Your Yahoo Account Now”. This was about a dream in which I discovered my Yahoo email had been created without my knowledge in the year 1980, and had received an ancient email with a very creepy image. This song ended up being way too trivial and silly for the album, so it was quickly scrapped. I never finished any demo of it. 

While writing the album, more dream song ideas popped up from day to day. Overall, during the album writing process, I had a backlog of about 70 short song ideas from my dreams that I’d recorded sleepily on my voice memos. I ended up writing my favorite 18 songs from that list, and then narrowed it down to 14.