Some songs tell a story, while others have quite a story of their own.In early 2014, I was making what I thought were hip hop beats in my parents’ basement. One of these instrumentals was an airy, triplet-based record sampling Tennyson’s “No Answer” and Ryan Hemsworth’s “Every Square Inch.” I scrawled out a descending major pentatonic melody on piano, chopped and rearranged samples, tuned the bass to match the detuned synths, and smoothed out the shuffling drums. Yet I still believed the trac...

Some songs tell a story, while others have quite a story of their own.In early 2014, I was making what I thought were hip hop beats in my parents’ basement. One of these instrumentals was an airy, triplet-based record sampling Tennyson’s “No Answer” and Ryan Hemsworth’s “Every Square Inch.” I scrawled out a descending major pentatonic melody on piano, chopped and rearranged samples, tuned the bass to match the detuned synths, and smoothed out the shuffling drums. Yet I still believed the trac...