This is the first song that I wrote and produced on my own.

The organ was the basis for the song, but then I wanted to record the soundscape of outside my house at night and blend it in with the music. I found an electronic drum and played a beat on my keyboard that I liked to play on repeat with the organ.

I played around with bell sounds on the keyboard a lot writing various parts. I wanted the song to evolve, but from the perspective of what was happening on top of the track, not the drum beat and organ backing the track. So I kept writing various parts on the keyboard with different bell sounds on the track.

The main lead part switches from one bell sound to another midway through the song. At the end of the song, a magical star shower sound is created with another bell sound and running my hand down the keys of the keyboard. I developed an ethic very early on to make everything sound organic, so I played each part in one take as perfectly as I could. That’s something I would continue to do in future songs.

That ethos of making things sound organic made recording vocals very challenging for me. I had lots of noise from my family at home, so I had to ask for privacy. I was constantly scratching out lyrics and rewriting things if for any reason, then it was because what I was singing didn’t fit the beat. I was glad with the outcome, and I learned a lot with the process.

My grandpa loved this song a lot. When I showed it to him he said it reminded him of a white tiger roaming around the forest at night, as if the lyrics were written about this tiger.

Since then I’ve basically decided that this is what the song is all about. And I keep this song in tribute to my grandpa. Love you grandpa.

This is probably the best song I’ve wrote and the one I worked the hardest on.

My dad brought home an electric-acoustic guitar, and oddly it was a Fender. I was obsessed with how it sounded with its stock strings and decided I had to write a song with it. I had an electric-acoustic Takamine nylon guitar, so in my head I visualized using both of them together in the song.

The drums and guitar came first. I think this was my first time trying Logic’s drummer, and if I remember they only recently released the feature at the time. I was so determined to record this guitar track, after a few hours of working I had the drum track I wanted, and I had a rough idea of the guitar. I kept practicing the recording of the guitar and managed to get a final take of the track.

The magic that happened with this track came with working with the rest of the song in bits and pieces. I tried out a bunch of synth sounds at various places in the track, and one rotating synth just worked in the first chorus. I also needed a lead-in to the song and the Fender wasn’t sounding right, so I tried the Takamine by arpeggiating the main chords for an intro and it worked. Again, the Takamine came in handy during the bridge when I played sparse notes with a delay, it added the perfect ambiance. I also found some loops in the Apple library that when cut and placed at the right place added the perfect kick to the song.

My sister heard the instrumental for this song as I was composing it from the living room. She came in and basically took over. She liked the track so much, she started writing to it right away and was telling me to cue it back to parts so she could hear them again and think of what to put down.

That’s pretty much how this song came to life, save the mixing and mastering process, which was quite a lot of experimenting.

Hopefully you enjoy listening to this. It haunts my memory pleasantly, and I hope it’ll be a good haunting for you.