The challenges of "Circular Song" (Pt. 2)

In this series, I discuss the inner guts of my music creation process.

As I've been very busy with preparing and then releasing my new album Fools of Us, it's been a while since I last posted a blog post. Happy to be back :)

And, so, back to the secrets of Circular Song, especially the various difficulties I had to overcome with this one.

So last time (see there), I had discussed how I’d got both what I felt an appealing, ever-evolving track with a circular melody, and an interesting attempt at using the words from one of my poems as lyrics to try and make the thing into a song, but that none of these actually fit together. So I had left this project settle down, and it stayed untouched for numerous months (more than a year, actually).

Then, while I was building the tracks of the Fools of Us album, I became compelled, one way or another, to revisit all this. I felt it was a shame this not-yet-any-good song would not come to fruition, as I’d love to see it make it to the album.

So I opened the Pandora box again, and took a fresh start at it. Time had done its hidden, magical work, and things that formerly were dead ends suddenly unfolded into avenues to further explore.

Of the original version, very little remains in the final track, except scattered elements in the lyrics within brand new ones that came up when the idea of slicing the melodic loop, turning it into choruses and inserting spoken verses in between, came up. Doing this resulted in a bit of a surprise, by the way, both from a musical standpoint and as regards the general meaning of the lyrics (although some of their hidden purpose was preserved).

The synth-like sound of the main vocals of the chorus responded to the will to mirror the initial sound of the wheel-like melody and pad, the tricky thing being to get something that was not as simple as a phased- or flanged-like sound, and evolves endlessly upwards, kind of. Spoken backings in the choruses also use some tricks of their own. Maybe I’ll tell more about the techniques I used to create these vocal sounds in some future post.

Anyways, this one probably was the hardest to mix of the whole Fools of Us album, and if one came back to it at a later time, the result could be totally different. Actually, I’m pretty sure of this, as I later found out I wasn’t satisfied with the mixing and mastering of the version of Circular Song as released on the No Limit EP (that pre-dates Fools of Us and was meant as an initial glimpse into it), and had to revisit the whole thing.

But I’ll talk about that next time. Stay tuned!

Play Circular Song

On Spotify ->

On Deezer ->

On SoundCloud ->