I released an album under the band name "KRMA" in 2024, called The Willow Tree. The band didn’t work out, and I pulled the music from streaming services, leaving it on my SoundCloud and sound.xyz under my name instead. I listened to the album on a train journey a few weeks ago, and except for my vocals and guitar playing feeling very dated (yes, I believe I have improved that much), the songwriting is very solid – it is essentially a life’s work of songs condensed down into nine focused tracks.

I encourage you to listen to The Willow Tree if you have the time. I have changed since then, but the essence of it is the same – it’s a rock concept album about despair, contemplation, and maybe some hope at the end. It got me through that rough time in my life.

Listen to The Willow Tree here

A part of me wishes I could revisit every single one of those songs, but I think it would be more interesting to really zoom in and focus on one. And though there are plenty of good songs in my opinion, the best were White Noise, 2045, Villain, and Masquerade. White Noise is essentially a pop song, so I couldn’t be bothered to redo that one. 2045 is like So Wide Awake in a lot of ways, and I think it would be quite boring to do. Villain is by far the best song I’ve written from a theoretical standpoint – I use polyrhythms, modal harmonies, and I even changed time signatures. However, the vocals are in the lower baritone range, and what I’ve discovered through writing a song a day is, I don’t like singing in that range. It doesn’t excite me, and I feel like my voice is quite dull. Moreover, I don’t think I can hold lower pitches well enough live yet, compared to the higher, pushing tenor range. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole album, listen to Villain (even over Masquerade in my opinion) – it’s the best showcase of my songwriting ability.

However, my favourite song by far is Masquerade.

Masquerade came about because I was in a dark place – such a dark place that I had essentially dropped out of school – so my music teacher reached out to me and tried to get me to write a song. He told me to write a song to a brief, the brief being: write a Pearl Jam-style song combined with a concerto grosso. A concerto grosso is essentially a Baroque composition where a few solo musicians go back and forth with an orchestra, and in this case, he was thinking of the solo musicians being the rock band.

So I wrote a riff – it sounds like Even Flow. They use the same interval – and then he sent me back a cool chromatic violin part.

Anyways, a year later, I revisited this song.

I ditched the entire concerto grosso idea (though I did keep the chromatic part – it’s in the bridge),

And I made this song into an homage to my two statistically favourite albums – Ten by Pearl Jam and Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette.

I love how the riff moves between octaves based on the section. In the introduction, it’s high up; then in the verse, it drops down to a grungy level, kind of like the riff does in Even Flow. And then in the guitar solo, it shifts to the octave in the middle of those two. Awesome.

I often talk about my favourite chord progression (I–V–♭VII–IV). The reason it’s my favourite is this song.

I love the bridge and the imagery the backing vocals evoke for me – I picture marching marionettes.

I could go on and on about how much I love this song, but the last thing I’ll say is: the song sounds great acoustically, and that’s really important for me, because that tells me the song has good harmony and a good melody. I love playing it acoustically – in fact, as it currently stands, the live acoustic version is far superior to the studio version, in my opinion.

So, if I love it so much, why do I need to change it?

As I’ve said, the songwriting is solid, and it sounds great acoustically, so no need for change there.

However, the other two aspects of producing a song could be improved:

• The performance

• The arrangement

• The mixing

The vocal performance specifically is very rough – and you can hear that evidently. Compare that to the acoustic version, which is laid-back, and it’s night and day. I also think the pronunciation of some words is a little harsh. Yes, I do lean into a bit of the Alanis Morissette, but that doesn’t mean the performance has to be overly harsh. I could do with some pitch correction, and I just need to relax – that’s the overarching theme of the changes.

I also think the song is just a little bit generally rushed – not just the vocals, but the entire song. The drums are very tight and really drive this song forward in a pushing manner, which I want to keep, but I think I could reduce the BPM a little bit just to get that more ’90s laid-back feeling.

You can hear this most at the end of the bridge - on the belt, it clearly feels rushed.

Moreover, the last chorus shows the deficiencies of the song - the vocals sound too saturated and compressed, and the electric guitars are too driving. I think arrangement-wise I will switch to an acoustic guitar for that bit. And in the guitar solo, I would like to add some more vocalisations - which may be difficult as the texture is already thick with some counterpoint and some strings, but I thing I can make it work.

In terms of the mix, the guitars are quite raw. That was the style I went for at the time, but now I’ve developed, and I would like it to be a bit more polished.

One thing that will be difficult is re-creating the guitar solo. If you listen to the solo at the end, I use three different tone settings on my guitar. The first bit is my Les Paul neck pickup, then it goes to the bridge pickup, and finally the bridge pickup on the PRS – and you can hear that in the solo as it goes from quite round to brighter and brighter by the end. I like that progression a lot, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do it with the same essence, if that makes sense. I’m not sure if I’ll recapture the magic.

I think I tend to rely too much on external plug-ins to enhance my mix – for instance, Fresh Air. I want to make sure that in this iteration, I’m not using any external plug-ins as a crutch. The song should sound good unmixed, and brilliant when mixed – not average when unmixed and good when mixed. And I think my experience doing this for 100 days now – you can see what I mean with songs like Where Are You Going, Hot Coffee, and So Wide Awake. The quality of the 100 Songs version is good, and the quality of the mix is great.

Finally, I will not change the lyrics in any significant way. I may change some words for flow purposes, but I’m not rewriting any bits, most notably in the outro where I may sing "we masquerade all night". I am in a different place to when I wrote them, but I feel singing them now from a better place will give them the laid-back optimism I want. I want this song to still be inspired by Ten and Jagged Little Pill, but maybe different songs. Rather than All I Really Want, I want it to be more like You Learn. Rather than Even Flow, I want it to be more like Release. Less angst, more polished – and still a friggin’ great song.

The simple answer – I love the song, and I want to play it live and tell people to go listen to it on Spotify.

Moreover, Masquerade is rife with nuance – something I feel my songwriting lacks when writing on a constrained timeframe. I want this song to be a showcase of what I can do when I have time to write a song, rather than a deadline. I think my Waste EP is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but no song hits me the same way as Masquerade. I can’t explain it. And I so badly want to do the song justice – to what it could be.

I understand how much you can love a creation now, I see why people love their kids so much, and want the best for them (yes I am comparing a song I wrote to my child). I still don't get how I love my cat though.

A year from now, I am going to be a better musician than I am now.

I’m studying Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) at university next year, and will improve – of course – as a musician, but more importantly, as a mixing engineer. I can’t tell you the difference between a FET and VCA compressor, I don’t even think I can hear the difference between a compressed and uncompressed track unless it’s blatantly obvious. I don’t know how sound waves work. There is so much left to learn, and I fully expect to laugh at the mixes I’ve made today.

The Willow Tree is all about time – the present, the future, and the past. What better way to show the progression of time than to take snippets of me living the life I wanted at the end of The Willow Tree – playing and singing my songs till the very end.