... and now it's finally ready to be shared.
Here's proof of how long this song took me:
(although that's the recording date. I started writing it a bit before then for sure)
AUDIO:
The song started as an idea: a Brooklyn love story about a man who'll never leave a woman slowly killing herself. But I didn't want to stop there; I wanted to combine so many different elements into one song: soulful vocals, R&B guitar, tabla tala, trap drums, psychedelic sound scapes, weird noises, dark reverbs, BUT WITH ROCK PRODUCTION.
Now I'll be the first to say that my desires for this track exceeded my abilities. There were times where I didn't know what the hell to do or how to get to where I wanted to go. Because of a lack of direction on my own part, there were times I just wanted to release the song as it was, simply to free up my own bandwidth to move onto newer music. So I would send it half finished or undercooked to a mixing engineer to put together. As you can imagine, me not having a concrete idea of what this was supposed to sound like ended up frustrating quite a few mixers, in addition to the fact that it's probably the largest recording session I've ever done in my life. There are A LOT of tracks in this one. Multiple listens will be required in order to hear everything. I had honestly given up on the track and it would've never been finished, let alone released, had not been for theProfessor. He always believed in this song and really loved it. Around 2022, I told him I didn't wanna work on the song anymore because I just wanted to move on from it, but he wouldn't allow me to let it go. Through his tenacity, and with his helpful ear, I was finally able to finish it.
I was supposed to release it early 2018, then late 2019, and then this past April (I wanted to release it on its 10th anniversary lol). This was when I thought it was ready after sending it out to be mixed by Chuck Macak (Fall of Troy, Letlive). It finally sounded as close to what I was hearing in my head as possible. However, upon a last-minute audio check, I noticed that the mastering was off! So I had to call off the release for last April to get it remastered by my favorite mastering engineer himself, Mr. Giovanni Cordova. He's basically done a majority of the new songs I've been releasing and his ear is impeccable as well.
The song itself was written in 2016, it has two bridges (each added a year apart from one another). The second bridge was added around 2019. I remember the moment it happened too: I was on Instagram Live performing the song. Then I just started noodling a bit and there it came. Before I knew it, I had to cancel the 2019 release date so that I could re-record the song with this new bridge in it.
The vocals were recorded so many different times. The ones are here on the track were probably done around 2021-2022. The only thing that is the same from the original demo is probably the guitar in the first half of this song. Everything else was came in waves throughout the years.
VISUALS:
I actually had visuals done and ready for this track years ago. However, the song itself was never finished to utilize those tracks and now they visually looked dated. I was initially thinking I would film something new, but I look back at the footage and found a bit of a charm to them. They were obviously filmed before I had any kind of means to get more professional looking footage. But I've also got to admit that there was an earnestness to the footage I shot on my own with my old phone. And that's when it hit me: this song was initially conceived around 2016, and it would be such a cool flex to have video footage that was genuinely from that same era of my life, AND for it to look genuinely like it came from then!
Growing up a millennial, we understood black-and-white footage to mean "old footage". I think now for Gen Alpha, seeing pixelated digital footage is their "old footage". I want to embrace the idea of going back in time both sonic and visually.
So here's the first piece of this journey into "Savage Grace". The debut of the music along with footage shot around the time I was inspired to record it:
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