After almost five years, I felt the itch again to assemble a new song. Many things have changed in five years, although I haven’t made much progress myself.
As with Keep Believing, I built this track using samples, many of them from ShamanStems, whose work made it possible for me to create music even when I don’t quite feel like a musician.
My new song Changes shares the same sound as the one I wrote five years ago. In some ways, they echo each other, two versions of me speaking across time.
Keep Believing belongs to a past that feels a bit distant now. When I wrote it, I was closing out a long, heavy phase of my life. The lyrics circle around the same themes: running without direction, waking up without purpose, falling into familiar patterns even when I knew they led nowhere.
It was a song about being stuck, and trying to convince myself that persistence alone would eventually pull me out. It captured the chaos, the numbness, and the quiet desperation of that time. The sound itself was more experimental, like I was trying to find a way out through the music itself.
Changes is the present. It’s more vulnerable, and also simpler. Instead of running in circles, it sits with the imperfections. It acknowledges the turbulence, the unresolved things, the parts of life and relationships that don’t fit neatly together but still matter.
Where Keep Believing was about escaping, Changes is about staying with the discomfort, the dissonances, staying with the people who matter, staying with the version of myself that’s still learning. It’s a song about movement, but not the frantic kind. More like drifting, adjusting, growing at a pace that isn’t always visible.
In the end, both songs feel like mirrors. One reflecting who I was, the other who I’m becoming. The sound hasn’t changed much, but the person behind it has.
I know that for most listeners (including myself), my collaborations tend to sound more polished and palatable. But from time to time, I want to make simple songs, the kind you can play on a ukulele. Songs that can be stripped down to one instrument on a desert island. But since I’m doing a studio version, I’ll go a little wild with textures.
Another reason I handle the mixing on these tracks is that I’m trying to make my voice sound like sugar. Layered, sweet, a little grainy. Not warm, not comforting, but something that shifts the sound and texture of the song. I want it to sit slightly above the instruments, not fully melting into them, almost overshadowing them in places.
I still have so much to learn, so each track takes a long time to finish. These songs are like small snapshots of who I am while making them.