"Breathe in"

there's a little bit of magic i feel when i listen to this track. the riff in the beginning is what pretty much spearheaded this entire EP. staying in the mountains near acadia national park was super inspiring and i'm glad i had my guitar with me. i was messing around with a few weird tunings and eventually ended up with something that left me with a sense of wonder, something like how i feel when exploring a new place. if anything, i could say that this song sounds like exploring somewhere new for the first time and taking it all in.

the best part is, we can do this more often than we think. it's truly an underrated feeling that i hope i never take for granted. i think this sets the tone of the EP perfectly.

"Electrical Storm"

ironically enough, on the same day i started writing "breathe in" in maine, that night had much different plans for me. staying up in the mountains can be beautiful when mother nature permits, but she had different plans for us that evening. 

that night, we found ourselves stuck in the middle of the most frightening storm i have ever seen, and i don't know if i'll ever experience something like that again. it was terrifying. wind was gusting back and forth, a great deal of rain let down on the mountain, but that wasn't even the worst part. it would go from pitch black, to flashing as bright as daytime every 2 minutes, making it impossible to sleep. those strikes of lightning were some of the most beautiful and terrifying forces of nature i've ever seen. it was touching down not even a mile away from us. it was one of the only times in 25 years i have genuinely feared for my life and had to come to peace with the possibility of it all ending right there. after hours, the storm subsided.

the second i got home, i set out to create something that accurately conveyed the hell on earth mother nature can cause, and the absolute fear and anxiety i felt laying there watching and listening to it all happen, being helpless and almost ready to die. a night i'll never forget, for sure.

"Comet 7/9"

the way this song came together was kind of odd, and altogether a blur. at the spur of a moment when i had some free time, i started playing the riff that opens the song, and i realized it was in an uncommon time signature, something i wanted to preserve about the initial idea. sometimes its fun when you play and don't think and see what happens. the title for this song comes from the first time I bounced it out to listen to in my car, there was some sort of small meteor shower going on. for some reason it felt like nature spoke to me cause i had no title for this song yet. and with respect to the project, i decided to listen. the 7/9 is not a date, but refers to the bars of 7/8 and 9/8 that loop through the song. 

i will say that i didn't know if i was going to fully pursue this EP until i started finishing this track. i felt like i had a breakthrough, and that this was something i could actually do. there was a bit of a lull in this time period in terms of writing, but by the time i got this done i was well out of writers block. i initially wasn't sure about the more "laid back" vibe to this song, but i'm really glad i stuck with it. it's a nice change of pace from the other 4 songs, in a way. 

"Annie"

the first thing i can say about this track is that i probably wrote it in 2 days max, the fastest of any track on "Verão". however, the post-production and mixing really got me tripped up, because i had so many different versions and went back and forth between iterations of the track. this is one of those songs in which it's hard to give context because i'm not sure where to even start, so i think leaving the art up to the interpretation of the listener is the best thing to do here. i hope that with this track, especially (and throughout the EP), you will feel the emotions that went into creating it.

i'm extremely proud with how this song came out, and it has some of the best dynamics and parts of the EP in my eyes. 

"Walls I've Walked Into"

the title of this song is something a stranger said on the phone when i was in an uber.  i have no idea why, but the phrase out of context seemed so poetic and fitting to me as a song title.

as i sit here and write this in august of 2019, its kind of crazy because i just wrote this song a month ago. this is an idea i had immediately after i left for tour this summer, and i didn't have my computer with me so i couldn't really demo anything out. i used voice memos of guitar parts and structures to write this song pretty much. so the whole thing took about a week or two to write, but when i got back i recorded it immediately. 

now with Secret Gardens, this was kind of a scary thing because i usually take a lot of time to embellish parts and sit on things. however, i tried to go outside my own box here and make it simple but effective. i sacrificed intricate rhythms and fast notes for chord changes and atmosphere in this one. that's one goal of this EP in general, but i think that was a bit more apparent in this song.

in terms of emotion, i wanted this song to be a picture perfect painting of my anxiety, and the anxiety of waiting for something you don't know will ever come. i felt that a lot when i was away for a variety of reasons, and this is the exact music that played in my head as i went through it. so if i have anything going for me, i can say that i think this one transferred from my brain to audio pretty well.