The Making of “Only a Hunter”

Lyrics inspired by several different dreams

Music inspired by 2 dreams from 10/14/2019 and 7/1/2020

Written July 2021/November 2021

My goal for the album was to be as eclectic as possible, so of course, I have to include a dance-pop/club-influenced song. The song is about various situations in which you just become evil when you’re by yourself (“The club of the hide, the things I hide, the things that you can’t see) -- especially in a dream, when the mind is unhinged. Because of the album flow, I had to put this song after “Poor Face”, but it does kind of hurt because that song is about how we don’t have to live like animals, but “Only a Hunter” is basically about living like an animal (“Whoa, place is allowed, only a hunter”). 

This was definitely the hardest song on the album to make. For the first demo, I was too embarrassed about my electronic production skills to make anything substantial. I made a generic synth and beat to convey what I basically wanted with the song, but it was nothing like the dancey house music that was in my mind. I gave Ramiel this demo to mess around with, and said that I was hoping for something like deep house and the group Everything But the Girl.

But it took maybe 20 iterations and back-and-forth changes of this song to get something that resembled the final one. A big problem was that we had disagreements over the genre influences of this song -- should it sound like drum and bass? No, that doesn’t sound like it did in my dream. Then Ramiel suggested that it should be really crazy and experimental, deconstructed club-esque, because then it would “fit” the sound of the rest of the album. But like, I didn’t really need this song to be experimental or deconstructed, or for the album to have any kind of genre cohesion -- I just wanted to recreate my dreams. I repeatedly had to show the evolving song to my other friends to get some outside perspectives on it because something was clearly going wrong and I was stressed out. Ramiel still helped a lot, though, by making a genuine house beat for the song. They made some really wildly different versions of the song that I would lift small ideas from, to gradually get to the perfect version.