Set Who You Are – Ray Toler

I woke up this morning with the music, melody, and overall production of this one completely formed in my head. And, of course, immediately decided that I’d stolen it. But it was too compelling for me to lose that off chance that I hadn’t stolen it. My morning routine is normally: get coffee, sit in the living room, pay attention to the dog, go upstairs, listen to yesterday’s song, write my blog post, do some other random things. Not this morning. I went directly into the studio to get this down before it evaporated.

Set Who You Are Ray Toler 4:40

That’s something that happens to me a lot and is a good example of those times when procrastination actually does bite me in the butt. I’ve even been in the middle of writing, think I’ve come up with an indelible hook, go downstairs to get a drink of water, and come back up to realize that I can’t remember what I was singing. Taking that lesson to heart, I put on enough clothing to not be sitting naked at the keyboard and fired everything up. I wasn’t entirely sure what the subject of the song would be, but the overall vibe was positive.

I had a snipped of the opening line and wrote it down, then quickly put down the bass line and melody. Most of the production was already in my head, at least in general terms, so I wasn’t worried about anything but getting the heart of it recorded. Time for lyrics. And coffee.

Coffee and Contemplation

While I was making coffee, I decided that I really needed to focus on making this one of those “Hey! I feel exactly that way!” songs. I took the opening line and applied it to a few conversations I’ve recently had and knew what it should be about.

With a fresh cup, I went back to that one line staring at me. The opening was strong, but as I started stabbing at it, things turned too negative in the third line. I also couldn’t decide if my rhyme scheme would be AAAA BBBB or AAAB CCCB. I left the first two lines (which survived to the final) deleted the third, and wrote the chorus which is, of course, the most important part of a pop song. In this case, that was the right decision.

This was one of those wonderful times when things just flowed easily. Importantly, I wasn’t being overly self-critical¹ and accepted the words that appeared. Also importantly, I wrote the last line of the chorus before I’d finished writing the first two lines of it. As novel writers often say, if you write the ending first, you’ll know where to go.

One lyrical conundrum was the last line of each verse. My initial line was “Just remember I’ll always be there,” but that immediately gave me two problems. First, it can’t be sung right against the chorus because they’d overlap. Secondly, I thought this made the message a little weaker – it made the solution and support external instead of internal. This is a song about picking yourself up, not relying on someone to help you.

Yesterday

There’s a famous story about how Paul McCartney was absolutely certain he’d stolen the song Yesterday, but after asking multiple people, decided that maybe he’d actually written something original. There were two things that convinced me to go ahead and record this one.

First, I sent the incredibly rough sketch to my neighbor who is wonderfully well-versed in modern pop. She said the verse sounded fine, and while the chorus sounded familiar, she couldn’t place it exactly. Familiar is fine when it comes to copyright and plagiarism, so that was a positive. Her husband seconded her findings.

The second bit of encouragement came from an incredibly surprising place: Reddit. Normally a cesspool of the worst of Internet discourse, provided some acutely pragmatic advice. The thread came up when I searched on “I think I’ve stolen a song.” Almost universally, the responses boiled down to:

Nothing is 100% original
All art is theft
Write it anyway
You’re not famous enough to be on anyone’s radar
You’ll only get sued if it makes a lot of money
If you write four-chord pop, there’s no getting around this

Every single bit of this is absolutely true. One additional thing that popped into my mind while reading this is that there’s a concept in copyright law that it’s possible for two people to independently create the same thing. If my search history had shown that I was scanning modern K-pop or boy bands, then there might be a strong case for an infringement suit. But this one quite literally came to me in a dream.

So I’m showing some personal growth and passing this problem on to Future Ray. If he ever gets sued over this one, he’ll presumably have some money to spend on lawyers.²

What’s In a Name?

The original title I’d given this was “How You See the Universe” which is fine, but (as always) I immediately thought, “I’ve already used ‘Universe’ in a title”³ and that was a problem. It’s not, of course, but it did make me think that maybe the title, while great for searching it out when you can only remember a bit of the lyrics, maybe wasn’t as strong as it could be. Then I realized that instead of the first bit of the last line in the chorus, the real title was the last bit. It’s more impactful and empowering. Instead of a syrupy cosmic question, it’s an imperative: set who you are.

Writing About the Future from the Past

Final bit here – I will probably come back and add to this post (with the Colophon if nothing else), but I can’t write about my production process because I haven’t recorded a thing yet.⁴ How much happens today will be entirely dependent on the time I can give it. It’s a big pop production in my head, and I’ve gotten better at knocking these other quickly⁵ but I’m also ok with maybe having a less-produced track. The important thing is that it’s written. And in less than an hour!

Writing About the Past from the Future

Well, here is the aforementioned addendum. I didn’t get enough sleep and need to get started on today’s track, so I will be (relatively) brief. Overall production was pretty straightforward. I got started too late⁶ but was never in any analysis-paralysis. In fact, I was being remarkably quick and decisive. I knew the general shape and sound I was looking for, and also knew that I was going to need to slap this thing together in less than 6 hours.

I started with the kick drum, which came from a new plugin, Chop Suey. It’s entirely a kick generator, so I was able to find something good pretty quickly, and it’s even tuned to the key of the song. With that in, I built the rest of the beat in XO, and put down the bass line for the verse and chorus. I decided to switch between an off-beat pattern in the verse and on-beat for the chorus, which helps change the drive and energy. There were a couple of tricky transitions, but I figured them out.

I laid out the arrangement with only the drums and bass. I originally opened with the noise swoosh straight into the intro because I’ve felt that the opening of Here and Now from last year is just too abrupt. Maybe I overcompensated because even with the swoosh, I felt it just jumped in too quickly, so I added the synth intro. It’s probably too much and will get cut later, but I like it for now.

Still with only the drum and bass, I recorded the verse vocals. Those went pretty smoothly, then Mary got dinner and I took a quick break. Note to self: Pad Thai is manageable, but not the best choice when you’re about to lay down some more vocals. It took me a little longer to record the chorus, but there were no major issues. I didn’t originally hear any harmony, but when I only had the octaves, it seemed thin. I added two voices each for the other two notes and did my normal pan-spread. I didn’t tune the verse vocals, but wanted the chorus to be tight, so I did a tiny bit of cleanup here and there so that the sustained notes really locked in.

Another change from my original plan was to change the chorus to have a smaller lead vocal for the end line of each stanza. A single voice was too thin, but doubling it made it just right. This really got everything feeling right emotionally and I also liked the idea of the back and forth of it.

And The Rest

Ok, we’ve now got the most important bits done: Kick, beat, bass, and vocals. There was still something not quite right with the arrangement and I thought maybe a breakdown verse would be good. I toyed with writing a slightly different version of the first verse, and may still do so in the future, but decided to just use the same words with a slight variation in the melody and chord progression. I’m happy with how that turned out.

It’s now time for all the other stuff: pulses, pads, arpeggios, whatever. Again, I knew more or less what I was going for, so I didn’t spend an indulgent amount of time looking for the “perfect” sound. The synths in the opening were close enough. The pulsey bass line that sits underneath the main bass worked pretty nicely. I had it in the same octave for the intro, but raised it up for the later parts of the song. It’s something I’d probably go back and do a lot more EQ, surgery, or just replace it with something else in the future, because it collides with the bass in the low octave and with the chorus vocals in the high octave.

I probably spent the most time trying to find an arp that wasn’t overly distracting. The one I finally found works, but it’s a bit generic. Another thing I’d spend a lot more time on revising. In fact, this is the kind of track that I could spend at least a couple of days fiddling with. Modern pop production is incredibly meticulous. While I don’t think this sounds bad at all⁷ it’s still in “demo” territory for me.

When I bounced all of the parts to audio and started mixing, I found that it was WAY too loud. I pulled all of the faders to zero, did a kick and bass balance, side chain compressed the bass against the kick, then got the mix of the chorus sounding right. With those all hitting in the right area, I did the verses and breakdown. Sweet! I wanted to be done before midnight and it looked like I was going to just make it.

Tripping At the Finish Line

I had two more tiny mix tweaks to do. This new version of DP has been a little less performant than I remember from last year, and my experience with all the crashes on day 1 got me back into habitually hitting Save. Right before making those tweaks, I did just that and a dialog box showed up asking me where to save it. Huh? I’ve been saving it all night. And weirdly, the folder it was showing me had the original project title (just the date) and not the song title.

Ok, whatever. Let’s save it and copy all of the audio again just to be safe. And that’s when DP apparently lost its mind. It said it couldn’t find the folder that I’d just selected. Ok, save it to a different folder. Nope. Save it to a different disk. Nope. Save it to another computer. Nope.⁸

Well, I have DP set to auto-save every ten minutes, so I probably haven’t lost too much. I looked in the project folder and the most recent auto-save is more than an hour old!!! At this point, there was much profanity, but wisdom prevailed.

Everything was still working in the program, I just couldn’t save. So I took screenshots of the mixing board, important plugin settings, etc., then quit DP and rebooted the computer. My proverbial bacon was more or less saved. Happily, the last auto-save did include the final audio bounces I’d done, so I didn’t have to go back and recreate those. All I needed to do was recreate the mix, which went really quickly. As an experiment, I tried to set everything without referencing the screenshots and much to my satisfaction was nearly spot-on. At least I’m consistent.

So I lost an hour, plus another half-hour of redundant work, then the time it takes to convert and tag the file I upload to the sites, but the end result is something I’m happy with. I think I can do more with it, and may in the future.

Lyrics

When you’re approaching the unknown
And you’re feeling all alone
And you can’t put down your phone
And everything is seeming so wrong

When the darkness closes in
And you’re crawling in your skin
And you think that you can’t win
Just remember this song

There are monsters in the dark who feed upon us at night
Put themselves inside of us and steal all the light
Keeping us awake and scared and tired but we might
Find a way to beat them down and  learn how to fight

You might tell yourself you’re nothing but just look at how far
You’ve come from the beginning you’ve been raising the bar
All that you’ve accomplished you’re becoming a star
It’s how you see the universe that sets who you are

When you’re feeling lost and blind
With the demons in your mind
And their words are so unkind
Remember you and I both belong

There are millions just like you
Who have learned these words are true
So the thing that you must do
Is keep on singing this song

Colophon

Instruments & Samples

Chop Suey, Hive2, Omnisphere, Rise & Hit, XO

Effects, Mixing, & Mastering

MOTU Dynamics, FabFilter, Valhalla, PanMan, UAD ATR-102

Notes

1
Which would have been ironic given the subject of the song
2
I’m kidding. Nobody makes money with music anymore.
3
Nothing in the Universe – 2023
4
Other than that awful bass/melody sketch
5
See Here and Now from last year.
6
I had said I was skipping the dog park, but then felt guilty and ended up there for two hours.
7
I’m actually pretty pleased with it.
8
I’m not quite at the point of saying that this version of DP is a buggy piece of crap, but I haven’t had any issues like this for years. It’s slamming the CPU, crashing, and now the stupid file system error shows up again after a decade of not seeing it.