The Making of "Gazing"

Lyrics and music inspired by a dream from 6/30/2021

Written July 2021

“Gazing” was (out of these) the last song I dreamed, the last song I wrote, and naturally the last song on the album. In the dream, I was watching an R&B style music video -- all I remember is a blue sky and a woman dancing -- with lyrics appreciating the musicianship of shoegaze. However, the lyric was, oddly “I see you’re standing straight” -- which doesn’t make sense because those musicians are supposed to be gazing at “shoes” or the pedals on the floor, right? So it was fun to integrate that into the lyrics somehow. The instrumentation in the dream had guitar, as well as a synth and drum part that sounded exactly like “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life” by Kim Hiorthøy, an experimental electronic song that I absolutely adore.

I’m really proud of the guitar on this song. The short guitar intro was the first thing I came up with, using already well-known chords, but that didn’t sound enough like what I heard in the dream. After noodling around, I came up with chords that sounded exactly like the dream. Making up completely new chords is always fun. 

The biggest challenge was to make the song as close as possible to “Hip Hop Is a Way of Life”. I don’t know why I had to make it so similar, I just had to because I loved the song so much. I borrowed several melodies and sound design quirks from the song, but still tried to keep it original. I tried to get help from Tobias to design the “clarinet” sound to be like the original song, but I ended up using the one I produced anyway. Tobias mostly ended up helping to improve drums and the chorus synth. I wish the clarinet was mixed even louder so you all could hear my effort in making it the closest clone to Kim Hiorthøy as I could, but I recognize that would’ve been a little obnoxious.