“In Deep Water”
I have always loved the ocean, and as a 5 year old I thought I’d be a marine biologist when I grew up. It makes sense, then, that my first album would be an oceanic concept album. An aesthetic blending of The Legend of Zelda and Sting’s “The Living Sea,” this album is my oldest work I’m still proud of. Created over the course of 3 months, “In Deep Water” saw my compositional ambitions grow ever-grander, blending in soundscapes and ambient noise to build a genuine world and narrative out of the album.
In some ways this song is quintessentially “me” songwriting — layers on layers, even more layers on the section you thought couldn’t have more layers, a dramatic choral bridge, and a strong focus on melody and bassline. Shoutouts to the fluid time signature (one of my favorite writing tools) and the cannon percussion.
This weirdo, dissonant interlude captures the majesty of the open ocean. It’s unclear as you’re sinking if the sounds around you are the belltowers of a distant aquatic civilization, the bellows of undiscovered leviathans miles below you… or whales. Maybe they’re just whales.
A self-explanatory 3 act musical portrait. The mixing took a lot of tweaking in the middle section to get the back-and-forth solos just right. I still appreciate how the structure of the 3 sections are ultimately quite similar, but feel so different.