everything else!

Last week, I released my new song & interactive music video "EVERYTHING!" into the world. This 4-minute audiovisual experience is the culmination of months of self-discovery, experimentation, and artistic doubt. It's a deeply personal work of art, and one that I couldn't have made without the help of many of my friends. I'm proud of how it turned out.

You can watch the interactive music video on your phone here — turn on rotation lock & don't drop your device! If you want to watch it on desktop or TV, or if you don't want to have to rotate your device, watch the static version instead.

If you just want to listen, you can buy it on Bandcamp (all proceeds go to Trans Lifeline!), or stream it on Spotify (all proceeds go to Spotify).

part 1: some context!

This is my first single in almost two years; as always, the gap weighs on my mind. The song drought was partly due to changes to my housing arrangements. For most of 2024, my PC setup was in a shared space, which I learned makes it hard for me to focus on what has always been a solitary hobby for me.

Moving in with friends also meant I started spending more time, like, hanging out with them instead of making music. This is exclusively a good thing.

Now that we've moved to a larger space that affords me a private computer setup again (and now that I no longer have a job weighing me down), I've been able to commit much more time to this hobby. Not all of my free time, though — between videogame hyperfixations, poor sleep quality, and random minor injuries, a lot of that spare time was spent resting.

That's okay. I no longer romanticize the all-consuming drive to create — the kind that leads to 10-hour DAW sessions, skipped meals, and atrophying relationships. I have a life to live, and it's actively living that life that gives me the spark to create things like this. Sure, I'd like to be able to crank out songs faster, but the pace I have right now feels sustainable, and that counts for way more than any songs-per-year metric.

Working on this project gave my life some much-needed direction for the last 4 months. It gave me a reason to pull myself out of bed in the mornings, to keep up my hygiene and health, and to keep a clear & focused mind. The prospect of calling it done was not only scary due to the overwhelmingly vulnerable nature of the art, but also because I now need to find other reasons to keep going. Not to worry, though; I have plans for the future, and I'm making that future real one day at a time.

part 2: the music!

There has never been a more me song than "EVERYTHING!". Melodic, emotional drum & bass has always been my lane. It feels like I've been trying to manifest this kind of song for the last decade, starting with "Where I Belong", then "Watch It Burn", and maybe "Melt Away" too.

part 2.1: the project file!

I started the project file in May 2024, worked on it a few times per week for a month, then barely touched it until January 2025. Once I found the spark to finish it, I worked on it about 4 days every week — which I know because I save an incremental copy of the project file every day that I work on it. The final save count was 75, by far the most days I've worked on a song.

The project is a little less complex than "relentless future", but still required multiple bounced stems,¹ and still broke into the triple-digit mixer inserts. It's also technically two project files, which I'll explain momentarily.

¹ Now that this song is done, I should probably invest in a more powerful CPU.

part 2.2: the vocals!

They're mine, if that wasn't obvious. The message I felt the need to deliver through this song is deeply personal; it didn't feel right for anyone other than myself to sing it. This left me with just one problem to solve, namely... I'm not a singer!!! 😱

Getting my voice to sound presentable boiled down to three factors: compromise, practice, and post-processing. Compromise meant forgoing my ideal vision for the vocal qualities in favor of what I was actually capable of making sound good. For example, my vision included single-tracked sections (i.e. only one copy of my voice) with minimal processing in the verses and bridge, but I learned that I didn't have the necessary control over my voice to command a standalone performance like that. Not for lack of trying, though; I practiced and re-recorded lines dozens of times, eventually comping the best takes from my later attempts for the final result. Basic stuff, but especially crucial when you don't really know what you're doing and are just playing it by ear.

The post-processing chain is so complex that it has its own dedicated project file. At the center of it is Infected Mushroom's "Manipulator" VST,² purportedly the same pitch-changing plugin used by Porter Robinson throughout Nurture. I also drew inspiration from Virtual Riot's "Back In Time" featuring Angelika's airy & nostalgic vocals, as well as vally.exe's singing on Aethoro's song "Sketchbook".

I can't claim to be completely happy with where my voice ended up; it still sounds noticeably amateurish in a few places. But I think that's okay. To my own ears, it comes across as campy, in line with contemporary hyperpop & indie tunes. And the sort of unrefined nature of the source material fits some broader themes that I'll discuss in depth in later sections.

I've long held the opinion that the human voice is the best instrument, according to the most metrics I care about. It's versatile, it's personal, and it communicates a lot to the listener — whether through words or performance. It's no coincidence that my songs have gotten more and more vocal-centric these last few years; expect collaborations with more singers in the future.

² You might be surprised to learn that there are no actual vocoders involved, but sufficiently heavy usage of Spectral Compressor is sort of indistinguishable from vocoding anyway.

part 2.3: the lyrics!

As with "relentless future", my hope is that the lyrics speak for themselves. If you want to chat about them (and we've talked to each other before), feel free to shoot me a message on the subject. Otherwise, there's little I have to add publicly about the words that made it into the song.

...

Okay, okay, I have one thing to say about the lyrics.

It's easy to fall into the rhetorical pit of attributing the evil in the world to everything. "Everything's gone to shit", "it's all fucked"... these thoughts come from a place of despair that we're all familiar with. I still catch myself going down that path whenever I catch wind of the awful news du jour.

What I offer you with this song is, to be clear, not some ultimate truth that dispels this lie. It's a rhetorical counterbalance. It's a celebration of all the parts of life that those defeatist statements ignore — a reminder to take a deep breath & partake in the beauty that can't be legislated away.

We've got a hell of a fight to put up these coming years. Take care to remember why it's worth fighting.

part 3: the visuals!

Assuming you read this blog on the web (i.e. not in an RSS reader), you've probably already noticed my affinity for hand-drawn typography. The title / header font meow.garden uses everywhere is called Shantell Sans; its letterforms were hand-drawn by the artist Shantell Martin, then painstakingly digitized by a type foundry. It's gorgeous; it's probably my all-time favorite display font.

This was, at least, one of the inspirations behind my decision to handwrite all the lyrics for the music video, using a mixture of colored markers, pens, and — most prominently — crayons. In fact, all 266 visual assets were hand-drawn, photographed, carefully rotoscoped off of the page, and animated in Blender — even the QR codes in the intro card!

To explain why I went to such lengths, I'll have to talk about another one of my inspirations, and probably the biggest one at that:

part 3.1: play chicory!

Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a coloring book disguised as a narrative-focused adventure RPG. It's my favorite game released this decade, as well as my favorite game that ends with "Tale". I won't spoil the plot here — suffice to say, its characters and their stories resonated with me deeply, both as an artist and as a creature of many flaws.

Also, the soundtrack by Lena Raine is my absolute favorite of her work. It's a perfect match for the game, and its dynamic qualities such as the ambient variants that play in between the major areas are delightful. Her liner notes for the soundtrack are well worth the read once you've played the game.

Oh, right, the visuals. Did I mention that you play as a puppy dog who is, canonically, not very good at drawing?

Your first impression of the game is filled with another wielder's colors; her name is Chicory, and aside from being the game's namesake, she's also your player character's biggest inspiration. When her colors suddenly vanish from the world, you are invited to pick up her magical brush and begin painting to your heart's content. In doing so, you quickly learn that your first impression from 2 minutes ago was not what the rest of the game will look like. No, you don't get to play with Chicory's gradients and tones and finely-detailed strokes. You get four predetermined colors (quite garish ones to start) and your paint comes out in pixelly blobs, reminiscent of the goop in Super Mario Sunshine, or perhaps Microsoft Paint running in the wrong resolution.

The paint controls feel clumsy, even a bit patronizing at first. The NPCs around your hometown ask you to color in their houses again, and while most of them respond to your effort with enthusiasm, some of them can't help but compare the quality of your work to the previous wielder, Chicory. Some of them see your art for what it really is: haphazard doodles, demonstrating nowhere near the skill & dexterity of your predecessor's colors.

All of this is intentional, of course. The purpose it serves is both mechanical and narrative. On the mechanical side, it serves to lower the skill ceiling. Even experienced artists playing the game are beholden to the same janky controls and jagged diagonal strokes as a player who hasn't drawn in decades. I'd like to think this is beneficial for both kinds of players. The skilled artist can relax, knowing that they don't need to try to produce some in-game masterpiece. The player who doesn't normally draw can relax, too, knowing that their skill level only marginally impacts the quality of their in-game drawings, and certainly won't impede them from completing the game. The jank signals to both kinds of players that quality isn't the point.

Quality isn't the point. Isn't that such a freeing statement?

I often hear folks with creative pursuits talk up "just making stuff", purely as an exercise in exploration, with no expectations of refinement. Hell, I've written the words "I need to fuck around with my synths more" in one of my old blog posts! Truthfully, I've always found it hard to put this mantra into practice. I'm always asking myself if the noodling-about I'm doing in my DAW should be fleshed out into a full song; I don't know how to switch that part of my brain off without turning it into a strictly technical endeavor. The same goes for my periodic forays into visual artistic endeavors — always in service of developing some skill, building up to some hypothetical future project.

What Chicory offered me, beyond a good story with charming dialogue, was a chance to draw with none of those expectations. I ended up coloring in the entire map — not for any achievement, nor even for a screenshot — simply because I wanted to.

"EVERYTHING!" presented me with an opportunity to revisit that mindset, at least in some ways. Much like Chicory's controls, crayon is a medium that eschews precision. The tip is unevenly shaped, constantly changing as it slides against the paper, leading to inconsistent stroke thickness. Texture and depth of color are both controlled by a single variable, namely pressure. Crayons offer a decent number of color choices, but I found myself sticking to around 8 or 10 colors that looked nice & cooperated decently with my rotoscoping workflow — a lesson I learned the hard way (ever tried to separate light blue from light gray?). All things considered, crayon has a fairly low skill ceiling, with all the positive & negative consequences that entails.

Of course, this art project was different in one major way: my doodles & lettering were a means to an end, not just drawing for its own sake. But I think I succeeded in approaching that first step — putting art on the page — with the Chicory mindset. The camera pan over the spread-out sketchbook pages at the end of the video is nearly comprehensive in its cataloguing of what I drew physically. You might notice just how much of what's on paper was used in the final project. Some sloppy letters here and there were redrawn; one verse previously written in crayon was redone in marker for thematic reasons; the 4-3-2-1 countdown had a couple of iterations since it was important for the digits to have maximum clarity. But... that's it. The source material is largely unrefined by design. Quality isn't the point. Even the cover art is composed entirely of sketches from the first page I started drawing on!

I'd like to think this approach to the foreground elements mirrors a certain carefree mindset found in the background's camera roll videos. Most people wouldn't think to retake a phone video of a sunset, even if a professional photographer might find it lacking in composition, or having unwanted foreground elements, or whatever technical issues might be present. The camera holder is capturing a moment, not filming a masterpiece! Much in the same way, this project is a snapshot of where I am currently in my creative journey — stumbling through the awkward process of learning to create for its own sake.

part 3.2: other inspirations!

I find myself particularly drawn to Arch Budzar's work, which invokes many of the same feelings I was trying to capture with my scribbles. These are pieces with incredible focus on execution; I can't speak to the mindset behind Budzar's process. But the execution isn't what speaks to me — it's the limitations, the stiflingly low ceiling on technical mastery of the medium. And it's the relationship between those limitations and the message of the specific piece. You are an individual, for example, wouldn't hit nearly as hard if it were a hyper-refined digital painting.

In the world of music videos, I'm quite fond of Porter Robinson's "Mirror", which combines crayon aesthetics and spatial tracking in what looks like one continuous shot. I was also moved by Chime's "Make 'em Proud", comprised of digicam videos from his childhood — an array of mundane but colorful scenes. I suppose my music video for "EVERYTHING!" is a synthesis between these two ideas, with a few more aesthetic cues taken from various drum & bass MVs (especially the focus on travel & motion).

part 3.3: the interactive part!

When I solicited my friends for camera roll videos, I didn't specify whether I wanted portrait or landscape videos. It was only after I looked over the footage folks sent me that I realized I'd need to get creative with the aspect ratios. The idea to have the viewer rotate their device in time with the music, along with the more intense "rhythm game" section, came to me all at once; I instantly knew I had to make it happen.

The rhythm game part was nerfed twice, owing to feedback from my close friends who "playtested" it for me. I was sad about the nerfs at the time, but it was definitely the right call.

I'm really happy people have been enjoying the interactive element. I was worried I was missing some subtle detail of phones that would break the gimmick for half of the viewers — maybe rotation lock worked differently on different phone models, or some other YouTube nonsense I could never plan around. Fortunately, nothing like that has come up. Two of my friends watched it by rotating their desktop monitors and it made me laugh both times.

part 3.4: the video software...

DaVinci Resolve, Blender, GIMP, and — the only one I paid money for — Affinity Photo. That's it.³

Well, that's all the tools, at least. The full recipe is a massive topic; it would easily take up an entire blog post on its own. Maybe I'll make something like that in the coming weeks. Or maybe a project file breakdown stream? Tell me what you'd want to know more about!

³ Somehow, no scripting languages ever became part of the production toolchain! I wrote some one-off Python scripts to clean up mistakes, but nothing I had to run more than once.

part 4: the album?

When I released "relentless future", I touted it as the first single from my upcoming album Light & Matter. And, indeed, "EVERYTHING!" marks the second single from that album.

That wasn't always the plan; in an ideal world, "EVERYTHING!" would've been saved for one of the last singles, or even an album exclusive. But — in case I haven't belabored this point enough — we don't live in an ideal world! There's far too much to feel despair over right now. This song exists firmly in that cultural context; it's the song I think my community needs in this moment. That seems like a more noble goal than giving this hypothetical future album the perfect single release cycle.

conclusions!

For better or worse, I don't know how to just "make a song" in any streamlined fashion. I'm still learning new things with every song I write; each one comes with its own set of creative & technical challenges. This has never been more true than with "EVERYTHING!". Up until the last few weeks, I wasn't 100% sure it would ever see the light of day.

Turbulent as my process may be, I think this is the most interesting creative artifact I've ever produced. There are so many micro-decisions that don't bear mentioning in isolation, but carry huge impact on the narrative. I'll spare you the tedium of a list describing all these little details. Just know that if you find some connection between the music video & song, or some internal logic to the instrumentation or the point-tracked elements... it was almost certainly deliberate.

If you take one thing from this project, let it be this: a beautiful world really is inevitable. No matter what, no matter where. Those who think they can erase the beauty from the world are evil, yes, but more poignantly, they're fools. So keep living your beautiful life. Do it for yourself, do it for your friends... do it for me. Promise?