For now, I’m going to treat this as a blog until I can figure out a way to incorporate NFTs or user-engage-able content in a way that makes sense to me/fits with the ethos of my music!
I wanted to give you a little peek into the making of “Half as Cool,” my most recent single (go stream it now if you haven’t, you idiots). I wrote the song in the spring of 2021 – April 2nd, to be exact – with my friends Elysse Yulo and Anna Kline, two fantastic writers in Nashville. However, the amazing, smooth, gut-busting riff that launched this whole thing was actually something I’d been noodling around with since December of 2019.
I slapped my guitar into open D (open C# in the studio recording) and came up with this:
I held onto the riff for over a year – I couldn’t figure out quite what to do with it. April 2nd came around, and I found myself in a writing session with Elysse and Anna. We wanted to write something nostalgic and a bit pop-punky – an homage to our childhood music tastes, if you will – and messed around until we came up with some ideas. Here are a few videos of us figuring out the essential parts to Half as Cool:
Left the session pretty psyched, but still feeling like something was missing for the song.
After many months, I posted the riff to TikTok – lo and behold! A bunch of people liked it. Got some duets from Andy Grammer, Tom Walker, and many, many others.
I figured I had to do something cool with the riff, and I had just written “Half as Cool” two days before, so I tried em out together. Bam! Sonic gold.
Held onto that for a while – I had no idea what to do for the production until…
I met one of my now-great friends, Nick (Wingtip), who’s a dope artist, writer, and producer here in LA. I think we actually linked because I cold-dm’ed him after seeing a viral tweet he had. We seshed in the studio until we had something that HIT.
The rest is history. Go listen now!