What it takes to "Fly" (Pt. 1)

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

Hey people, as I was posting recently here, it's been quite a while, and I've been so busy I had precious little time to add posts to this blog. But I've been thinking about you guys all along, and about the good vibes you give me when I see you've read them (lots of thanks for that!). Let's hope you get good vibes too reading them! :)

So at last here's a new post, and I hope you'll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing them.

This one is about "Fly", the first (and last) track of my Fools of Us album.

This song exists in actually 3 versions (so far) : Part I and Part II (which respectively open and close the Fools of Us album), and the Full Length version, which is featured on the No Limit EP.

Fly is another tribute to trip hop. This one could have been subtitled “hope”, “strength of will” or “resilience”, as this is what it is about, in the end.

It comes from an attempt to have two bass lines live together, on top of each other, in the same song. At the beginning I was playing with the old "kick & bass" trick, and then it came to me that I could as well try a "bass & bass" something. And stumbling upon that experiment started this whole, long (and enjoyable, and rewarding, as far as I'm concerned) trip.

It ended up, when completed, as quite a mixing challenge, as these two different bass sounds were so massive – especially the one used for the “walking” line – that keeping their strength while avoiding their taking up the whole space in the song was far from easy. And I mean it, it took me ages to manage taming these two sounds together and having them sit in the mix.

For those interested, the “walking” bass sound is itself not one bass, it’s made of 5 different layered sounds playing unison, all of them trimmed down to a specific (for some of them, almost subliminal) element. I think I'll have to devote a whole specific post to this some day, there's a lot to say about that (so stay tuned! ;) ).

Apart from these aspects – which came up at the mixing stage, not at production stage – this probably is the one that was the most straightforward (and most fun!) to produce altogether, of the whole Fools of Us album. Another possible subtitle could have been bliss, in this respect. The organ riff and related sound was a nice, partly unexpected discovery, lyrics flowed pretty much naturally (this track created visual images very early on, and it only took to capture them in a few words), the drum sections found their place in a non conflicting manner.

The same goes with the introductory part and all the little sounds and riffs that are spread out across the whole length of the song: upon it's creation process, each of them suddenly appeared as sort of obvious elements of it that needed to be there (but not necessarily to be noticed) and, contrary to other songs, it was not too hard to find the right spot for each of them.

This song was also the opportunity to (at last) find a place for a guitar riff that had been around, in a very bluesy form, for ages (and I do mean ages, truly). One of these kinds of basic ideas you play with and come back to again and again, in different forms, with various surroundings, but never really find a way to do anything serious with. Not all of it made it to Fly, but its essence is there, and that’s a great satisfaction (you want all your babies to find their home). Even if it's almost non existent in Part I (and really is unveiled in Part II), this guitar riff gives its mood to the whole track, even Part I per se, which actually is influenced by many more things than just electro, rap or trip hop. This riff lost part of its bluesy color in the process but, as a trade off, that was the door-opener to the progression that takes place in the second half of the full track.

About progression precisely, at some stage it became obvious that this track should both open and close Fools of Us, the rest of this album being some sort of extended time lapse, a set of windows to other landscapes, a journey in between these two parts. Claiming that Fly was made for this very purpose from its inception would be untrue, but once being born, it became apparent that this was its true place. On the other hand, the full-length version included in the No Limit EP restores its original spirit.

This track is one of those I got the most positive feedback about, from a lot of various kinds of people.

But it’s your call to decide on that. I hope you enjoy it.

Cheers!

Play Fly (Part I)

On Spotify ->

On Deezer ->

On SoundCloud ->