Thank you to all of you who have subscribed so far, you can access the song on all platforms, here

Shout out to Ghost Linkz for the Artwork, and Matt Lee for the release on Tortoise

For this release, I wanted to use the concept of A-sides and B-sides. I did this because I believe NFTs are the digital vinyl. When vinyls used to be released, they often included bonus tracks or B-sides – and this felt like the perfect opportunity to try it out.

On Warpcast/Farcaster, I’m running a special deal – the first ten people to mint Side A will receive Side B for free.

On this blog and on my website, you can access the song using the code caffeine on the landing page for the release – comment how many times I mention that word throughout this article 😆

Another thing I want to establish with this release: yes, I want to be “Web3’s first rockstar”, but rock music shouldn’t put me in a box. Side A is a Soul/R&B-style song, while Side B is funk – but they both still have elements of rock. I think when people hear “rock”, they think of loud, distorted guitars and screaming. I’ll definitely be doing that in the future, but I wanted to start by showing the less intense side of rock. Both my singles are piano-driven – but I’d still say there’s some rock ’n’ roll in them!

Where Are You Going is song 16 of my hundred-day challenge, and conveniently, the release date is 16 May.

I stumbled across a snippet of this song while scrolling through my notes app (Google Keep). I found this:

hello,
let me dream about tomorrow
about the power-ridden crossroads
hidden in the words I borrow

If you listen to the melody, you’ll see why I had to change the word hello – the chorus wouldn’t work otherwise.

I knew I had to release this one because when I performed it live during my challenge, random people started filming me, and I really felt good on stage. I posted a clip on my socials and got a great response.

In the demo, I used Logic’s built-in bassist and piano, and I loved the bassline it came up with. Both made it into the final version – with some tweaks.

So yes, the piano, bass guitar and drums in this song are all MIDI – but I think I’ve done a decent job of making them sound real. Of course, they’re not a substitute for the real thing. That said, I saw Bryan Adams yesterday and, during a lot of his set, the bass was done on a keyboard – still sounded great!

The main difference between the demo and the released version is that the final version is more polished and 3 BPM slower, so it grooves better. I also redid the vocals, backing vocals and electric guitars. Plus, there’s no intro and no fade-out in the outro.

This was a fun song to write, a fun song to film, fun lyrics – and most of all, it was the only song I had that stylistically complemented Where Are You Going

I wrote it while chatting to a friend who was visiting me, just noodling on my guitar until I came up with the riff.

I’m really happy with how it turned out – the funky guitar works, the guitar solo is much improved, the vocals sit nicely and are well performed.

The song is a satire on caffeine addiction and has a strong ’70s vibe. I loved adding tremolo in the B section to give it that extra psychedelic feel.

I also think the exclusivity around this track is handled well – not too hard to access. It’ll go on streaming platforms once the music video is released.

Half of my time on this release went into mixing – the other half was spent endlessly working on an NFT player for my website.

This taught me a lot about Web3 – and its flaws. Everything is incredibly fragmented right now. If I upload to Zora, Sound, Tortoise, my own site, Catalog and everything else, then there’s no longer one address on the blockchain for this NFT – which is odd. Every platform seems to want to be a centralised hub for an inherently decentralised experience.

So, I chose to use Tortoise. After chatting with Matt, I managed to figure out how to get my songs (using their Tortoise address) onto my site. Once you figure out how to get the IPFS, it’s pretty straightforward – but it’s still not easy for the average person. I hope that changes.

The website, in my opinion, looks good. It has an embedded version of this blog, a page dedicated to my hundred songs, and a page focused on Web3. I figured out how to find the IPFS files for my NFTs and used Pinata’s URL to pin and play them on the site. (Note: to make the tracks downloadable, I had to upload the audio and image files directly to my site – but the NFT mint pages use IPFS/Pinata for metadata.)

It was a lot of work – using a combination of AskGina.ai and GitHub’s Copilot – and given that I’ve got no HTML experience, I think it’s pretty neat that I figured out how people can mint NFTs directly on my site.

I created a custom page for the song link so I could include an NFT mint button and embed the coded B-side (code is caffeine, in case I didn’t mention that!).

I think I’ve almost nailed the code and admin side of this process now – so future releases should be far less time-consuming.

I hope you enjoy the song – looking forward to releasing the next one too!

Desh Saxena on Warpcast

The Release is here - collect Where are you going on /tortoise The first 10 to collect will also receive the Bonus track hot coffee for free https://nfeed-frame.vercel.app?id=ce9ab7c2-5314-417e-9c4d-f96cf189e9c7&img=bafybeihfewgh2ohpq4bnjurlezz6qwf7nkqlphan5gaxmn634qvbkpo2cm

Farcaster