Over Easter weekend, a new song appeared rather quickly. That doesn’t always happen. Some songs take years. This one took a couple of days.
I thought I’d share a little of how it came together — from the first rough voice memo to the finished recording.
Songwriting is a strange process. This time, the song came together over the course of a single weekend: melody, lyrics, recording, everything. It started on Good Friday.
Creative energy tends to show up when I’ve had a few days off work. I’ll often pick up the guitar and know fairly quickly whether melodies are going to come easily or not. This was not one of those days. But lately I’ve been practicing some new fingerpicking patterns, and while moving through a fairly simple exercise, a melody began to appear between the chords.
I write appear on purpose because music feels strongly visual to me. Every song has its own images, and this one did too. I’m not really superstitious, and I don’t generally believe in mystical explanations for these things, but it still often feels as if the images are already there somewhere, waiting, and my job is simply to find them. Despite my built-in scepticism, I like that thought: that songs might come from somewhere deeper than the firing of neurons in my brain.
The melody that appeared this time was simple and slightly aching. It felt white, somehow, and I could see a person walking. The images are not always that clear, but when they are, the lyrics tend to come more easily too.
Whenever something like this happens, I record it on my phone straight away. That is by no means a guarantee that a new song is on the way. As I write this, I have 6,037 recordings on my phone. A lot of them are rubbish that will never go anywhere. Others are fragments, sketches, half-ideas, and some are almost-finished songs still waiting for the right lyric. That Good Friday session gave me six new recordings, all different stages of the same idea.
This is not usually something I share. It’s a little embarrassing, to be honest. Bad sound, lots of fumbling, and me singing nonsense English placeholder words into the melody. Deeply undignified stuff. But for a newsletter about the songwriting process, it felt fair to make an exception.
You can hear the early beginnings of “I Walk Away” here
The next step was the lyric. What was the song actually about?
Quite often, I start by listening back to the nonsense words in those early recordings. In the later takes from this batch, you can hear me singing something like “I fall away...” in the chorus. Combined with the image of a person walking, that quickly turned into “I Walk Away” — which fit the rhythm of the chorus much better.
That part matters a lot. Words have to sit properly inside the melody. If they don’t, the whole thing collapses. It’s about the number of words, the number of syllables, the shape of the sounds, the stress of the line, the way the words move when sung. Meaning matters too, of course, but at first it often comes second.
So: I Walk Away. At that point, the brain starts working on its own, away from the instrument. Words gather. Lines begin to form.
I walk away from the suffering
I walk away from the fall
I walk away from the loneliness
I walk away from it all
I walk away to be rescued
I walk away to be carried again
I walk away to ask for
Some help from a friend
An early chorus draft: two-sided. A person who seems to be leaving, but is really reaching for help.
From there, I went down a number of roads: loss, grief, surrender, faith, exhaustion, the need to be understood, the need to be held up by someone else. It became a little too big, a little too abstract, and eventually a little confusing.
You can read some of those drafts here
In the end, I landed somewhere much simpler, and much truer: friendship. The song is really about turning away from pain, loneliness and hopelessness, and turning toward the person who helps carry you through.
You can read the final lyrics here
At this stage, I also recorded a video of how the song sounded at that point.
I started the actual recording on Saturday. Once I’m in that kind of flow, things usually move quite fast. I generally know where I want the song to go. This was always meant to stay simple: no complicated production, no endless layers, just a few instruments, acoustic guitar, maybe a little piano, a close vocal, and some backing vocals.
In the end, I landed on a guitalele I recently brought back from the cabin, and a slightly off-kilter piano sound from Pssst Instruments.
You can hear the vocal, guitar and piano separately here
And if any of you happen to be remixers, feel free to have a go. The BPM is 166 and the song is in — hold your horses — C.
Over the last few years, I’ve learned how to mix and master my own songs. That has been genuinely liberating — not just for my wallet, but for the freedom of it. Still, I’m not much of a production nerd. I’ve never been the kind of person who gets excited by EQ curves, dynamic range, transient shaping, stereo width, or the finer mysteries of what exactly is happening at 3.2 kHz. So, whenever I find tools that make life easier, I’m very happy.
I won’t go into detail, but VocalChain and Ozone 12 have both made the entire process much simpler for me. I don’t tweak endlessly. I listen on headphones, on speakers, on my iPhone speaker, and on a couple of other headphones, adjust a few things — often the bass — and then I let it go. Mixing is one of those things you can keep doing until you lose your mind.
With music like mine, the real differences are often barely noticeable to anyone but me. That said, I have a lot of respect for people who truly master the craft. In other genres, and in bigger, denser productions, those details can make all the difference.
By Sunday, the song was recorded, finished, and ready for the world.
That said, I already have a lengthy line of other songs waiting in the pipeline for the year ahead, so I don’t yet know whether this one will slip out in between them. Do let me know if you have any suggestions around a release.
For now, though, you can find it on my website.
