Here’s my third release, team. “Must Be Me”. This track is loosely about mental health, because it’s a journey I’ve been on for years, now. But it’s only been the last few years that I’ve begun to recognize the depth of how my own mental health has affected every area of my own life.
This track was never supposed to be my second release… Bad Actors was. But I fell back in love with this beat in the middle of working with Dawningale on Bad Actors… so here we are. Most of you know that I started in music as a producer—not an emcee. I’ve always been a music-first artist and I think this track really shows that. The track was originally created on my beloved Synthstrom Deluge groovebox/synthesizer—all the way down to the arrangement. Then, I chopped it up and rearranged it and mastered with vocals in Logic Pro X. (Making ONE song from A-to-Z is a huge journey!) I’ve spoken before about how I codename all my songs using a random work generator… but since most of my music ends up being pretty abstract, the names often stick. That’s where this title comes from. I made the track artwork using a combination of Bing Image Creator and Pixelmator Pro. That was fun.
My first publicly-released single, ever. That’s why I’m so proud of this song… because I made it through the journey to get here. It means so much to me, and I hope you love it.
The music for this song was originally created on my Roland MC-101, and then chopped & rearranged in Logic Pro. The simple, bouncy groove really spoke to me, and I knew pretty quick that I would include it in my first album. But I didn’t know it would be my first single.
When I first sent this song in for mixing & mastering, the final chorus you hear did not exist at all—it took me some soul-searching before I decided I wasn’t happy with it. That was difficult because, honestly, I was TIRED at that point. The road to get there had been so long, and I felt like I just wanted to push it out the door and move on.
But I knew it needed to be better.
So I just kinda went back to the drawing board with the song. I took a step back to get a wider view. I gave myself that weirdly-necessary SPACE to forget about the song, and then remember it all over again.
That’s when the chorus groove came to me. And once it did, I pulled in Cat Rap & Kitty Nap (both my kids, 9 & 12 at the time), and they laid down their backing vocals in a single take. I liked the rough, DIY feel to it. I laid down my own final chorus vocal, and then the arrangement kinda just fell into place after that.
I learned SO much in the process of making this song. I’ll never forget it.
A video for the SynthStudio Youtube channel describing why I love the Decksaver (protective cover) for my Roland Verselab MV-1 (expensive music device).