Words by Josh King.
“It’s the kinda thing where I tell you I’m in love,
and it takes you a couple months to catch up”
When I wrote this couplet – which would eventually go on to be some of the key lines in my song 116 – I was going through somewhat of a rut. I hadn’t written a song in months, and I was in a relationship that was over, but hadn’t ended. It was a strange time, but when I wrote these lines I felt like I’d written the first part of something great – and maybe more importantly, something honest.
Fresh off the release of his incredible new single 116, Gold Coast artist Josh King walks us through the story of how the track came to be.
Sometimes you get lucky with a song, sometimes it writes itself. Emotion just floods out onto the page and articulates what you’re feeling in ways you hadn’t been able to before that moment. Sometimes though, you’re not that lucky, and 116 was undoubtedly the latter. It took over a year (on and off), for me to find the right way to say what I needed to say.
Flash forward to September 2019, and I’d managed to piece together the song over the course of a year. In that time, I went through a break-up, moved back in with my parents, and my iPhone randomly died. That last point is important because that’s where all my voice memos/lyrics/song ideas were kept, and apparently they weren’t backed up (learn from my mistakes – back your stuff up!). Of course, I couldn’t remember everything, but the melody and lyrics for the chorus of 116 kept coming back to me, and since the break-up, my perspective of the song had changed, and I found it quite fitting. Remember when I said sometimes the song writes itself? Well, that’s kinda what happened with the bridge. Once I’d reassessed my headspace for the song, everything I was feeling just came out.
A couple of days later I took the song to my friend/producer Jared Adlam, who helped me bring the song to life. 116 is an honest look into my life from ages 20-22 – a journey of losing myself in love, and the songs you hear next might shine some light on where I ended up. All I can say is that everything happens for a reason, even if I haven’t quite worked it out yet.
Listen to the new single above.
