The songwriting process always begins with a feeling. It was a normal November day. I had finished school and was sitting in my room after lunch, dwelling on my thoughts, aware of emotions churning under the surface. I wandered to my piano and instinctively started playing whatever was going on in my head. At first it made no sense. If someone had been listening they would have covered their ears, but the playing allowed me to focus my emotions, channelise my energy, isolate exactly what I wanted to communicate. Very soon, I had a melody. I played it over and over and over and soon enough my thoughts translated into words. Those words I sang along with what I was playing - and just like that, in two hours, I had the beginnings of a new song. The basic structure and concept was in place.
The vocal melody, however, took time. I played at least three different versions over the next three days until I patterned out the final shape. At this point, I had already got what I was feeling in the lyrics and the notes. But the way the melody was going to flow communicates the emotions by itself. In one version, I was alternating with pitch and messing with the beat, but it didn’t sound right. It sounded too upbeat, too frivolous as if asking the song itself to drop the emotion and feel better. The next melody I came up with was too slow, too dark, it would’ve been too lost in the dept of melancholy. It took time to find that balance I was looking for. Funnily, I cannot explain that balance, even to myself. It’s just this odd scale I have in me, and as I play and sing, the scale moves left and right, until finally it finds the middle, and I know I have the right melody.
Even when I had the melody, I just had it for the chorus. I still had the verse and pre chorus to go. But this was something I loved doing and after I had the hook melody, the rest of the song came together very quickly. I knew how the song energy would drop and build, and exactly how the pattern would go. Over the next few days, I played and sang it over and over, until I had fine tuned it to and could perform it without glitches.