The whole thing kicked off at the start of 2024.
I had this one sitting where I found a chord progression on my Wurlitzer and just immediately started building on it… adding drums, bass, and all these other layers.
In that same session, while I was improvising over the loop, this one line came out: ‘take a look at the sunshine, Honey it’s alright, who can do better.’ It felt right, so it stuck.
And then… nothing. That’s all I had: an 8-bar verse with a bunch of instruments and one single lyric. I wasn’t sure where to take it structurally, so it just sat on my hard drive for months.
It’s kinda funny looking back. I’d open the session, listen to that loop, and just draw a blank. I was totally procrastinating.
When I finally forced myself to finish it in March, I had to write the rest of the lyrics to complete the song. It was only then that I realised what the song had become about. It’s about breaking past that exact feeling of being stuck, of procrastinating, and just taking control.
I didn’t even know that’s what I was writing about while I was in it.
The breakthrough on the music side came when I figured out the B-section. I had these 9th chords I really liked, so I tried them out, and they worked.
The ending was the hardest part. My first idea was this big, cheesy key change, and it sounded awful. The part that’s on there now was actually a random idea from another song I was working on. I just kind of stitched it on the end, and it just seemed to fit perfectly.
A lot of the track’s sound comes down to the gear. That main guitar line you hear all the way through is my guitar plugged into an old MXR envelope filter.
The big synth chords are a Roland Jupiter 4, string sounds are from a Juno Gi and then flutes in the outro are a Mellotron plugin.
I think my favourite line is the one that captures that whole feeling of finally getting unstuffed: ‘the earth it moves to a rhythm, so you’ll see me walking, to the beat of my heart.’
Words by Al Carlo
