I have always believed that in a song you should be telling a story…
At the beginning of my song it is all about questioning the way that you are and wondering why you are this way – this is the first verse. The second verse is all about realizing that you need to stop being someone you’re not and be okay with who you are, to have the courage to be yourself. These two verses speak to each other in the song - it is a questioning and answering process happening inside of the song. We thought that we were done with the lyrics when we had completed writing them yet I did not quite feel that we were “finished.” Being the perfectionist that I am, I didn’t quite feel as though it was IT. I knew that we were reaching something, however, I didn’t feel that it was 100% the message that I wanted to get across to people. I really want to reach people with this song and the song that we came up with wasn’t as powerful as I thought it could be.
We found a producer, also a good friend of my mothers, Lionel Bastos. He told us that he really liked the song: the message, the feeling and the tone. He gave some great feedback on the song and shared some ideas with us on how we could make it better by applying some changes – he felt that it needed to get to the catchy parts faster so that it could really capture the audience’s attention. To do this he suggested some swaps in the order of the song and gave me a structural order that he thought could work better.
I went back to Tina with this information. This changed everything. It also caused some struggles as to how we should transition from verse to verse as the orders of the song were now swapped around. It ended up with us cutting out two verses in the song which it could do without – otherwise the song would be 7 minutes long. We changed some lyrics around and after 2-3 months, we had our final draft of the song. One which I was very proud of. We added a climax in the song too which was something I felt that the song needed. With our new version I felt much more confident. I truly felt that this was IT.
I had my introduction, I had my build up, I had my climax and I had my conclusion. All the things that I wanted in my song – I could not have been happier in that moment.
