Prosumer Confessional Demo: I originally started writing “Deep In Yr Mind” in early 2015 and I had the lyric “If I apologize for all the things I did I said I’m sorry but I’m just a stupid kid” but I didn’t have a song to put it with.
Around that time, I was enrolled in an audio production program in Toronto and i started playing around with what I was learning there and experimenting with MIDI and making weird electronic music. It was all new and exciting and I made this “learning music” and it was layers of fast arpeggiated synths and it honestly sounded like musical barf. Sometimes when I’m writing stuff I’ll be in the zone, and this was not one of those times. It just felt like an experimentation session where I was not into what I was doing at all. I was laying in bed with my computer just kind of absent-mindedly throwing stuff together until around 4:00 am and then eventually, I slowed it all down and there was a cool pattern that emerged. It emerged from the barf.
I decided to try the “If I apologize…” lyrics out on that experiment, add some more instrumentation and that got me to write more lyrics and finish the second verse. After that session and a few more, I had all the lyrics and this strange little song.
That song is the “Prosumer Confessional” version of “Deep In Yr Mind” and it sat around for a while.
Stupid Kid Demo: Then I finished school, moved to a new place and started working as a typist at an insurance company and I was writing music and playing in a band and stuff and it was a bit of a weird time in my life.
Anyways, I’ve always liked sampler instruments and sampling stuff, speeding things up and slowing them down, etc. & I had a theremin at the time and it was really hard to play well. So to circumvent having to actually try to play it, I tried to hold a single note on the theremin and then take a sample of that note and turn it into a sampler instrument that I could play with a keyboard.
Long story longer, it immediately sounded great and then I came up with that pulsing keyboard part, took the “If I apologize/deep in yr mind” lyrics from the first demo and turned it into a whole new thing with live drums, guitars, etc.
That is the “Stupid Kid” demo which I recorded in various home studios and is pretty much what the final version was based off of.
Final Version: The final version was recorded with moon:and:6 and when we’d originally recorded the drums, they were flawed. Quality was good, but it was a slow tempo and I couldn’t play in time very well so the whole thing was sounding flat and weird. Michael took the track and replaced the live drums with samples of the drums and gridded them (leaving in the drum fills) and then it started to turn into the final version.
“Deep In Yr Mind” is the only song on the album that has a single tracked vocal in the verses which gives it a more intimate quality than the other songs. It also has a lot of sound effects in the background like wind and waves and it was extended to be longer so that there were more “deep in yr mind”s at the end.
I remember when we finished it, I had it on CD and I would drive around my hometown at night really fast blasting it and being like “oh shit this one’s good!”
Since its initial release, it’s been played over 5 million times on Spotify, Youtube, etc. and people have really connected with it. I have my own special secret ideas about what it means to me, but I don’t want to give too much away. –jwc