Lightbulbs lore: seabreeze
In 2008 or so while in college, I started writing music I thought would be a cool fit for video games, thinking I could pitch a portfolio of my work and land some gigs doing this after college. I wrote this small ditty based on meandering piano chord progression called “seabreeze”, meant as background music for some kind of seaside town in a role-playing game. Submitted it to a few places, never went anywhere.
When I ended up taking a tech internship and that internship turned into full time work, I scrapped this plan and reworked “seabreeze” for an album I started work on — slowed it down, added a shuffle, loaded with reverb, sort of a an homage to Massive Attack’s “exchange”.
That album was sort of a dark take on trip hop with industrial influences, and came to be called KID LIGHTBULB based on a line from a different song (I’ll write about that another time.)
I released that album quietly, and separately started writing another song called “trendsetters” which had the line “I never know when to say it” as a key part of the refrain. This line stuck with me and I ended up noodling on a different song with the same lyric.
That different song was yet another reworking of the same meandering chord progression from “seabreeze”, which I started to simply call “I never know.”
As I was planning an album in 2013 called BEDTIME RITUALS, “I never know” and “trendsetters” were ideas I had under serious consideration - they were related, and the former ended up forming a good pair with a different song called “ritual”, which at the time was much more upbeat than the icier, slower version I ended up releasing a decade later. I ended up reworking “ritual” into the song you may know now, and scrapped “I never know.”
When I started the Kid Lightbulbs project, I revisited “I never know”, rerecorded a sparser version of it, and almost included it in the final sequence of THROW MYSELF INTO THE BAY. I originally envisioned it in sequence after the track “bubble”, with a smash cut transition. But then I wrote the belong reprise and scrapped “I never know” yet again. It’s now a b-side you can hear as a Bandcamp subscriber. The “seabreeze” piano chord progression has still not seen a release to this point.
Earlier this year, once Kid Lightbulbs started getting some early interest, I began revisiting the BEDTIME RITUALS sessions more holistically from back in 2013-2014. “Trendsetters” was the first song I revisited, and became my first proper single in February. The “I never know” lyric got stuck in my head again and I wanted to figure out some other way to incorporate it into the themes of STEP INTO THE OCEAN.
I had this other old audio session from back in my aspiring-game-composer days, meant as more of an action sequence bit. It happened to be the same bpm as “trendsetters” and I thought they’d pair together nicely. I ended up picking the “I never know” lyrics back up and reworking them into something more jaded and angsty, which then became “digression”.
“digression” also includes lyrical references to a different track back from the KID LIGHTBULB days called “left in ignorance”.
I don’t yet know if the “seabreeze” cut will see the light of day again, but maybe it will? Anyway, the creative process is weird and wild and sometimes happens over decades.
This was fun to write.
Posted on July 26, 2024 #music #analysis #essay