One day I sat down in my studio and decided to write a love song. One that would capture the tender and intense experience of feeling, falling and being in love. I gathered my mélange of musical tools and so this song began its journey.
This song's progression was not just a quick summer storm blowing through, but a climate pattern emerging over a three year period, one with numerous stops, starts, and revisions. The initial title I narrowed in on was actually “Beyond a Doubt”, not “Lightning”, but I found myself quickly getting stuck trying to force those lyrics into the chorus. Sometimes you just can't make stuff work. An idea may fuel the start of a song but it can sometimes keep us from letting the song change and evolve into its best self. I decided to let this song simmer on the backburner while I worked on other things and when I returned with a fresh perspective, it evolved naturally into “Lightning”.
The chorus was not the primary reason for the prolonged time spent on this song though. It's the progress along my producer journey that has been the biggest challenge. Though I don't consider myself new at producing, the trajectory of my production career is still in a steep part of the learning curve, it has departed infancy but is still smack dab in its youth.
Writing, recording, arranging, mixing, mastering, and releasing a song are all skills that take time to develop and master. Each part is involved and nuanced, requiring a balance of technical skill, musical ability, trained ears and habitual practice. And in addition to that, technology keeps changing and you have to adapt while still learning. I'm not unveiling any new insights here, but societal pressures to produce quality content quickly against reality's timetable in doing so, are often vastly different. It has taken years of incremental habit to develop each of my skills and I still have miles to go.
As I've honed each producer skill, I got excited and recorded some songs. Then I'd learn another skill, and record more songs. And so on and so on. Maybe I should have written less songs to finish more, but I also didn't want my songwriting (my biggest strength) to get stale either. So before I knew it, I had amassed a huge collection of unfinished songs. Too many to farm out to specialists to fill in where I was lacking and too many for me to tackle on my own. I find it funny when I hear people say, "don't be afraid to delegate". I would love to delegate, but you need a budget I don't have, to delegate. So I've been trying to balance writing new songs with revisiting the unfinished songs in my song graveyard and seeing if I can dust them off and bring them back to life. So apparently, you can dust off Lightning!
Another fun anecdote about this song happened purely by accident. A collaborator of mine, Allison, and myself, had been bouncing around ideas for a band name for a project we do together. She had the idea of delving into animal group names and we shared quite a few giggles exploring this clever and strange realm . If you aren't familiar with these quirky and amusing collective nouns, I highly recommend looking them up. Some of my favorites are “a conspiracy of lemurs, a shadow of jaguars, a pandemonium of parrots, a kaleidoscope of butterflies, a parliament of owls, a gossip of mermaids, and a blessing of unicorns”. Kaleidoscope of butterflies was one we milled over for our project name but ultimately didn't pick, but it got stuck in my head and ended up in this song.
I got swept away into a world of metaphors and similes writing Lightning, and enjoyed writing a love song without the word “love”. Here are some of those lyrics:
"A kaleidoscope of butterflies rising up inside.”
"Works of art that open up the blinds”
"When you look at me and smile it's like fireworks igniting”
"When our hearts intertwine it's like lightning striking”
I also, as I often do, had quite the collection of lyrics that didn't make it into the final version. I was particularly sad to see the following lyrics go, so sharing them here will give them a place to live besides under the caption “Unused lyrics” in my lyric file:
“Like works of art stealing the spotlight”
“Like whispers from a butterfly that lands near by”
“Your eyes finally see all the colors that awake”
“When our melodies combine it’s like the sea and sky are harmonizing”
“When you hold me in your eyes”
“When uncertainties become starry nights”
And with that, I will wrap up the tale of “Lightning”, its production ups and downs with a barely hanging on laptop and a borderline unhealthy tendency to re-write, re-record, and tweak the mix a hundred times. Amidst my search to capture falling in love in a recipe of lyrics, melody, instrumental arrangement and production, I once again found the truest kind of love. The love of creating.
Thank you for reading about my journey creating “Lightning”.