do you love me truly love me do i know what love is do you?
lyric discussion:
i wrote the music to this this winter then took a break from songwriting. i decided to just steam of consciousness sing something over the music and this is what came out. the music was meant to be the ambiance of being in the middle of no where in winter. the lyrics start with literal winter and speak on how it comes and goes and changes. writing the lyrics now that summer is beginning i think lead to the more positive spin as winter is ending. the next section moves to the figurative version of winter, loneliness. speaking on the feeling alone even when you have people who love you, then if you really know what love truly is or if anyone does.
theory discussion:
i know i chose a specific mode to write this in with a reason that it felt like winter to me, but i don’t remember. I did add in cave sounds in the background so thats fun.
you’ve got a lot on your mind you’re sad and lonely your thoughts are racing, spinning by even when you close your eyes you have to get through this day the minutes slowly pass you by you can do this
fake happy say cheese smile smile show teeth, smile turn off your mind muddle through smile, smile, smile
breathe just breathe in and out breathe
chorus repeats
lyric discussion: first of all i think it is interesting that in this song i automatically went with the pronoun you instead of i like i did with floating by. i think that is because the feeling i am capturing in this song is something that i have dealt with by coping the way described in floating by. this is more me talking to my past self especially in college when i was very stressed and had to work really hard to get through bad days. this is all pretty self explanatorily describing that life is hard and you feel bad but still have to do things and sometimes the only way to do that is faking it till you make it. putting on a happy face and getting through the day even if it is painful. this song is also kind of satirically making fun of songs telling you will be ok. my vocal delivery in the chorus is purposefully strained, and sounds especially so on the word smile (which is a horrible word to sing on as english speakers naturally swallow the word because of the l consonant). i think the way i did this is kind of both making fun of songs that try to give out this advice in a very vapid way, and also making fun of myself for really thinking like this in my past and sometimes now when needed. it was also fun to add in the little meditation section. meditation is powerful tool, but when you are struggling mentally a lot of people will just ask if you have tried meditating as if that will fix all your problems. while it is very helpful, especially with keeping mentally well, when you can connect and be in your thought it can come off as very annoying which what i am trying to convey here.
theory discussion: i started this project by deciding i wanted to play around with some modes though my next couple of exercises. for no particular reason i decided to start with lydian mode. i chose to write it in f lydian as the i want to stick with keys in the modal system that would be played on all white notes. lydian mode is an alteration of the major scale that raises the 4th degree in this case b flat to b natural. this forces the scale to include the tritone of tonal center which causes some additional tension. that is where i got the idea to write a song called fake happy, as lydian mode to me sounds very happy the raised scale degree even making the listener feel more uplifted, but it does have the underlying darkness of including the tritone aka the “devils interval” as it was referred back in the day. i went with a I iv vii I chord structure to emphasize the altered scale degree and add some tension. in the bridge i wrote out the lydian scale up and down with chords only on some of the more important notes to try to disguise the straight up chords and added a swell on f on the off beats to try to replicate the kind of music you would hear at a spa or in the back of a meditation audio. in the chorus i emphasized the tritone with the little beeping sounds alternating from being based around f to based around b to add some extra tension and really focus on how something is wrong even if things may sound like they are moving along and working.
stars sparkle bright in my mind, in my mind pink fluffy clouds shaped by clowns float by my eyes are closed solitude fills the space i need a way out my mind, out my mind
but i’m floating by, floating by’s what i do i get by floating by, floating by
i hear the world all around as it spins a thousand eyes blink at me, blink at you a ball rolls down an unending hill i need a way out my mind, out my mind
but i’m floating by, floating by’s what i do i get by floating by, floating by
lyric discussion:
in these verse lyrics i wanted to convey some images i commonly see when i am disassociating and kind of have them come out of no where and make no sense as that is how they feel for me sometimes. in the first verse i went with things that came to me in the moment looking around in my mind and my current surroundings. for example it was around sunset and i saw the pink clouds outside and imagined a clown at an amusement park making cotton candy that were the clouds i could see. in the second verse i went more with my common visuals i often see a kaleidoscope of eyes and i used to always feel like a ball on a track that was in no control of its trajectory when i was in college and was fully disassociated from reality just letting things happen as they did. i think these lyrics kind of all just feel random and i dont love them, but it makes sense with what i was going for as well so i dont hate them. if i revisit this song i will probably rewrite the verses as i was just going to time while writing these and just wanted to go with the first thing to pop in my head for creative writing reasons. the chorus is pretty simple to me it just came out of my mouth the first time i tried to sing a chorus on this over my backing track. i am just floating by in order to get through what i do im not very grounded and its very airy. i do like these lyrics as i think they are nice and simple and led to a very pretty floaty airy melody here.
theory discussion:
for a while i have had the idea to base something in a c major/a minor deceptive split key. i went about that in this by basing everything around a four measure repetitive chord structure of I IV V vi in c major creating a deceptive cadence ostinato that make it feel like the vi chord at the end (an a minor chord) could possibly the the tonal center. [that was a run on sentence and i don’t want to fix it ;p] i further emphasized this up in the chorus by adding a drone on a to really begin to push things toward feeling the minor key as the tonal center, but kept the light airy syth keys in this section in c major to disguise this and add a light airy feel. the post chorus section is where i really emphasized the a minor key and tried to make if feel like things were spinning and going off tilt. in this section i added more drones on a this time raising by an octave every measure to give it a rising feeling. i also added a quick 16th note whole tone scales starting and ending on a that are pretty subtle to give a dreamy feel. finally i added a repetitive almost alarm or warning type sound that still feels semi friendly by being a fun doot sound, but i put it on alternating quarter notes from a to d# which is a tritone, the interval said to cause the most tension. also the d# is a part of the whole tone scale on a so it hopefully would not sound too out of nowhere. finally i stripped back to just the piano ostinato and repeated everything to give a break and a moment of calm after the chaos only to repeat the same cycle exactly again.