This song had quite the journey from inception to the way that you hear it on this recording.

It was originally recorded as a voice memo on my phone that I forgot about and left in the proverbial pile of half finished songs. During the first couple months of the Covid pandemic I began to teach myself how to make professional recordings on my own. To find a test subject, I went through my hundreds of voice memos and picked this song out to upload into my software. This was mostly to work on taking something of low sound quality and refurbishing it with the tools I had. But during this process I found that I liked the message and sound of this song and ended up putting in some final writing touches to finalize the composition.

Once I was a little more comfortable with my recording setup I decided that this would be a good test run for my production skills. I began recording the rhythm guitars, upright bass, vocals, and lead guitar. The laptop I was working on was fairly old so at this point so I wanted to start properly backing up my files. I bought an external hard drive and tried to back up the song. However, I made a mistake and ended up deleting all of the audio files in the song instead. I tried to find ways to recover the files, but ran into a dead end.

In a fit of frustration and creative energy, I rerecorded most of the instrumentation and vocals that night. I’m not sure if this made it sound better, but I had the motivation at this point to make the song work.

I was struggling with my novice skills on the upright bass and sent the song out to local bassist Abbey Blackwell whose intonation and technique are leagues ahead of mine. This is where the song began to come alive. I next sent it to my talented friend, Remy Morritt, who played a delightful and simple drum groove that helped pull all of the disparate elements of the song together. To fill some space and add sparkle, I had my friend, Owen Thayer, play pedal steel. And to add one final touch, I added background vocals of my own.

With the song mostly done, I dove into the world of mixing for the first time. I experimented and learned about all the various tools and plugins at my disposal. My brother, Ayal Subar, does some audio production work and is always the best resource for all things production and technical audio. He gave me some tough feedback that I didn’t really want to hear and lent a couple simple suggestions that helped to shape the overall sound of this piece.

I sat on the recording through a really tough breakup, moving to a new apartment, and quitting a job I worked through a large part of the pandemic. Since it was such an emotional journey to record this song I didn’t feel ready to send it out into the world. But now those things are past me and I’m ready to move forward. This song is about the reflection of past hardships and relationships on your life and what you do with all of those memories. It also yearns for the seemingly simple life we had before March 2020.

Thanks for listening. I hope to see you all soon.

Love,

--Micah