The process
How a song
actually happens.
There is no lightning-bolt moment where a song appears fully formed. It is a chain of small, mostly unglamorous steps, and it starts with me humming into my phone in the car. Here is the whole route, honestly.
It starts as a mess.
Every song starts as a mess of scraps: notes typed into my phone, lines on the back of something, voice memos of me humming badly in the car or the kitchen. None of it is organised. Most of it never gets used. But the good ones are always hiding in there somewhere.
Then it meets a piano.
The fragments that survive get worked out by hand at the piano. Rough, unpolished, just enough to turn a hummed idea into chords and a direction. I record those takes exactly as they are, wrong notes included, because that is where the feel lives.
The pieces get assembled.
All that raw material, the sketches and melodies and piano takes, gets pulled together into one rough draft with the help of production tools, AI among them. This is the fastest part and the least precious. It gives me something to react to, which is very different from a finished song.
Then the long part.
This is where nearly all the time goes, and where I am probably insufferable to live with. Rewriting, re-singing, shifting sections, deleting things I liked yesterday. A draft turns into a song through hundreds of tiny decisions, and I have never found a shortcut.
And finally, the mix.
I mix every song myself, balancing everything until it stops sounding like separate parts and starts sounding like one thing. When it feels right, out it goes. Then the next one starts, usually that same week.
Alone, but not that alone.
Nearly all of this happens on my own, from the first voice memo to the final mix. But nobody is good at everything, and when a song needs an ear I do not have, I have a handful of people I can call. Independent, yes. Isolated, no.