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.