Music

What is Mirrors?

I think I spent more time on this EP than I ever have on any song, album or project put all together. Coming up with the idea of ‘Mirrors’ and the overarching ideal of self-reflection came natural to me as a follow up to ‘Reborn’.

I look back now on the ‘Reborn’ album, and know that it was something that I truly needed to just release and get out of my mind, body and spirit. Every single thing that I had gone through in the last decade, I compressed into very small windows in the lyrics for the album. It’s only now really that I realize that… well, quite frankly it was a super depressing album. I do cherish some of the tracks, and wish I had worked on the overall record more, but it is what it is.

Moving 2 years later into ‘Mirrors’, I think it’s a huge departure from what I’ve ever done before. I needed that cathartic moment of clarity to really express myself and change. From tracks like ‘Illusions’, ‘To Be’, and ‘Who Cares’, which quite frankly I think are my favorite tracks in the EP. Every song, in its own way is different from the other. I chose 7 tracks for this particular project, simply because the idea of self-reflecting is to shatter your expectations and who you once were, and become better. That idea of shattering, reflecting on the name of Mirrors (no pun intended), was perfect. 7 years bad luck, as they say, if you shatter a mirror.

I don’t think I’ve put in this much emotion into the lyrics, vocals and feeling of the songs in any other project. It feels nice. Freeing, even. I had a wonderful time picking out the names and their overall story, and from start to finish it is an amazing path.

Illusions

Illusions was the second track that I was ready to start with, for this EP. I wrote it in a way that has a person thinking back on their life, their mistakes, their pain – and realizing that they need to change. Understanding that looking deep within yourself, and at yourself, you will find that you’re no longer who you thought you were. The idea of finding a new solution for breaking, after finally finding peace. After letting someone, or something, break you into a million pieces.

The idea of looking at the mirror, and thinking you see an illusion. A figure that you once thought you knew, and realizing that mirror is cracked, and it no longer reflects your heart anymore. Only after realizing this, can you really move forward.

Burning It All

Burning It All was the first track I heard from a producer that actually started the entire ‘Mirrors’ project. From the very first note, I fell in love and it’s huge kudos to the amazing producers on this EP, seriously.

This song follows Illusions, after realizing you can move forward, you start reflecting even more so on your past, your mistakes, your regrets and those bridges that you crossed that hold you back from your true potential. This song is about burning it all down and starting from scratch. Almost like a phoenix, I suppose.

This track wears heavy on my heart, because I had so, so, so many different variations of how I wanted to go with it. The very first version, which I realized a slight snippet of to promote the EP, was a bit more rock-ish. It began the idea of adding a scream into the ending of each song, almost transitioning into the next song. I do wish I could’ve kept it a bit more emotional and strong as I originally intended, but the message still stands clear on the song itself.

It’s all about finding yourself, and understand those struggles, triggers and broken parts of yourself. Burning it all down, and starting over again.

Fade

Fade is the third track for the EP, and in fact was going to be the very last one until I kept increasing how many tracks I wanted included. There were at least 10 different versions, and I think it started more like a rock song with a gritty voice. I ended with a more alternative, indie vibe and it is what it is.

With this track it follows ‘Burning It All’, and it’s about not fading away from your core. With this new change in yourself, with having to burn away everything in your past and path, don’t get caught up in the flames. It’s about remembering who you are at your core and not letting yourself forget or fade away. After all, if you forget who you are, who even are you anymore?

Higher

Higher is a track that I really enjoy, because it’s super cheesy. I would joke around that it’s about my bed, and imagining a commercial about selling beds playing this song. Of course this song is a love song, and follows Fade. I’m not one to say who or what it’s about, or if it’s about self-love in some sense – I’ll let those who listen interpret it as they wish. I have my version of what it’s about, and I’m sure they will have theirs. But yes, it’s a love song.

To Be

To Be was the only track that I did in one take and really went into it lyrically, and vocally. One thing I absolutely love doing is creating an ambiance with a lot of reverb and creating a haunting sound in the background.

Lyrically, the song is about being yourself. About looking over the line, and letting go of all your worries. The song, to be blunt, is about being the best you can be. It’s about pushing through all your pain, worry and hurt and being the best you can be. I’ve been asked a lot on what “…these oceans don’t need to be free, all these eyes looking down on me, they remind me of who I used to be…”.

Quite frankly, it just sounded good at the time. But in reality, it’s the fact that you don’t need to be just like everyone else. You can be however, whoever or whatever you want to be and be happy. People will look down at you, and you’ll remember sometimes that you were one of those people once upon a time. But now, you’ve grown, you’ve known happiness, and you know the secret on how to be yourself.

Who Cares

In this track for ‘Who Cares’, I was incredibly inspired by the horrible things going on in Australia right now, with the fires and beautiful animals dying due to this. The song, in its lyrical form, was meant to be viewed through 3 different perspectives: Someone who doesn’t care about the world at all. Someone who does care and is seeing everything happening, and someone suffering from this entire situation.

There is so much fake “care” in the world right now, just to get reactions out of people through social media, that instead of trying to make a change, those people just want more likes and whatever currency that they find is best for them to feel valuable.

The overall idea of the song was just someone who’s pissed off at the entire world. Seeing the world go up in flames, and seeing that no one really cares or wants to do anything, mostly because it’s an inconvenience, or because people really are that blind. The lyrics are just about that, that no matter how much we are warned and told to care for the world – who cares enough to actually listen?

Mirrors

For the seventh, and final track of the EP, I decided to finish it off referencing some of the track names, while concluding a journey of this whole idea of self-reflection. The idea is about talking to yourself, and moving on – as we have been trying this whole time. But you’re stubborn, you can’t. You’re realizing just now that your past, your mistakes and your regrets no longer reflect on who you are today, and who you want to be. You’re finally moving forward.

Mirrors is the song that ties it all together, and finishes the song with “…the past doesn’t reflect on me…”, as a way to give the people that have listened, really listened, since the first track, a little nod. Your past, your choices, your regrets and your pain – it may have molded who you are today, and who you turned out to be, but it doesn’t necessarily need to stay that way. Your decisions from this moment forward will mold that vision. Be who you want to be. Love who you want to love. Your past reflections don’t reflect on you.

Final Thoughts

Like I said, it’s a completely different approach to music – well, at least for me. It’s been an incredible journey, and I’m so excited to share this entire EP with you guys this year. For now, you can check out ‘Who Cares’, and give it a listen if you wish.

Thank you for reading, and much love.

Feeling Better, Doing Better, Becoming Better

I’m really happy, weird right? No, but after a couple of months of infections and just not being able to get over this silly thing, I’m able to work on music again. I’ve decided to re-upload my previous tracks ‘On This Moment’ and ‘Torn Away’, even though they were pretty old and don’t represent me as the artist I am today. However, a few people have asked them to be up for listening purposes instead of having to go to obscure websites to find them. Why not?

 

Listening to ‘On This Moment’, and remembering the lyrics and how I prepared the song with the producer from that song – going into the studio and getting ready to release ‘When Angels Fall’, and ultimately not doing so. The irony of that song was the fact that when I started working on it, to even doing the demos that are available on the site, lyrically the song is about wanting to run away, disappear and instead keeping to myself. I was quite the depressed individual back then, I’ve learned to cope with said depression after a long time, but it was rather upsetting hearing this song basically being a, “I will be here, every moment for anyone, even if it hurts me, even if I have to wait ’til death. Show me that I’m worth it, that this wait is worth it, that our moment is worth it.” It was a song about struggling to hold on, even though I want to run.

 

Around the same time, I had written ‘Torn Away’, with the same producer on board if I remember correctly. That song was definitely more of a “I’m done. I’m gone. ‘This is why I’ve given up on everything, including myself’, it was a re-enactment of a lot of things in my life”. A few years ago, I tried to commit suicide, I’m open about it. I had given up on a lot, I was on the streets, I saw nothing else but just despair and darkness. I wanted out. To this day, some days I do still want out. The song starts out with how I started it. I took an entire bottle of strong anti-depressants / sleeping pills, because I just couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t hear myself thinking anymore without the endless drowning of thoughts. That night I had a horrible panic attack, and a lot of things had collectively pushed me over the edge. I awoke 3 days later, unable to walk and dealing with months and months in absolute agony within a couple of hospitals. Learning to walk again, learning how to adapt to the nerve pain I still deal with on a daily basis. After all of that, I fought and fought to get into a real life. Sadly, I had fallen deep again after all of that. I was tired of the lies, the deception from others, the darkness, the reflection that I saw in front of me. The song was a reminiscence of the entire experience, put simply.

 

Through all of that, and much more than I’d care to discuss, I continued to fight my way out of my own personal hell. There was a particular song that helped me through it all, I guess an album really. ‘A Star-Crossed Wasteland’ by In This Moment. That album kept me alive in a sense. The one song that just kept ringing in my head until I could replicate it on the piano in the hospital I was in, and then singing it for the other residents was ‘World in Flames’.

 

 

That song kept me going, no matter what. I was able to keep fighting. At the time, I wasn’t able to touch anything with my feet without crying or being in an absolute hellhole of pain. I had my brother, whom without his support I don’t know what I would have done. A few times when my family would visit, my brother would help me on the hospital piano by putting his foot on the reverb pedal. This love, this newfound light had helped me through so much. After all of that, I went through another traumatic experience and as I said in my previous post, I dealt with it. It took me about 5 years to finally push through and move on, but I was able to.

 

 

With ‘Reborn’, my entire goal of the album is to motivate people. Tell them, I know shit sucks. I know that life is horrible. Most days, I don’t even want to get up. I want to give up, I want to just end it right there. But there are reasons to keep going. Use your pain, use your experience. Turn that darkness into light, and change the world for the better. My entire purpose for ‘Reborn’, is to tell people the following, “Keep going”.

 

Stay true to yourself, and never change for anyone.
David

 

Finally… It Only Took 5 Years!

Well, I’m pretty damn excited. Quite honestly, there’s been a lot in my life that I’ve just let wash over me and I never got to deal with it properly. Since my teens, I dealt with things in a way that wouldn’t be deemed healthy – I ran. Whether it was emotionally or physically, I ran away from anything that seemed impossible, from issues that I couldn’t deal with on my own or just because it became too much. In 2013, I set out to work on my music from my own solo work to my band project (The Broken Poet Society), and a lot was worked on. Some of you may know that I was working on an EP called When Angels Fall, the irony of that was I was basically done and I wasn’t satisfied with the work at all. When I was getting close to the end, and prepared to start marketing it, I had received some alarming news which caused me to stop everything I was doing, everything for a good year and a half.

 

2013 came and went, I had already dealt with an amazing and equally devastating experience, of which I won’t share here – I needed time to grief and I drowned in the depths of sorrow like I had never felt before. I could not escape the depression, the shame, the absolute devastation of what was a broken heart. 2014 had already come and I decided to run in another way, I created an online gaming community known as Eterna Gaming. For a while we did pretty damn well, and I poured my focus into that – because anything else was just broken and I had no focus in my life for music or art, it was too painful. 2015 came, and I still was stuck in my own little world, avoiding what I could and never shedding a tear. 2016 had burned through and I started to slow down, and my grieving period was just ending – funny enough looking back at it, how at the end of this period I just felt like a failure because I had some amazing ideas to throw out, and I couldn’t even push through the pain to see it through. 2017 came and thus ended my grieving. No more did I feel this darkness, this depression that was grabbing at my knees – attempting to pull me down into my own personal hell. The first half of the year, I disbanded Eterna Gaming, ending the 3 years that I had worked amazingly on it. I learned quite a bit, from marketing, public relations and touching a sense of fame in a different world.

 

By November, I finally came to my senses and my art came rushing out. I started slowly, by working on an original piano piece I called, “Behind These Eyes”. I left it as it was, incomplete and damaged – something resonating with how it was created to begin with – and let it simmer for a few weeks, before I decided something that I knew was another escape. I was going to release an album, no matter what – and it would be soon. I had set this idea in my head for a few years and it always left as quickly as it came, but I pushed and pushed through. I designed the cover art and back art, using some nice forest stock pictures, and editing them in a way that felt proper to me. This light versus the darkness, this clashing of two opposites while hope lingered (the particles). I knew it was to be. I decided to speak with an amazing pianist, and producer Jurrian, and decided to work with him. I wanted to revamp ‘Goodnight Kiss’, bring forth ‘Waking Up’ – which I had never officially released, and it just felt like a song that still resonates with me, and finally finishing ‘Behind These Eyes’.

 

Through and through I kept pushing and pushing, which then my body was pretty much like, “Well this is new, I’m going to need you to stop”, and well I got sick. Starting with the project I got an ear infection, which was whatever honestly, and I kept pushing. My eardrum decided to rupture, and well I couldn’t hear very well or sing anymore. After the hearing somewhat came back and I could somewhat sing, without sounding absolutely haunting – I got a wonderful case of the Man Flu, well it was just a bad cold. Now, as I’m typing this up I am fighting the last phase of this cold, which is the coughing phase, and hoping that I can then add vocals to the rest of the album. I’m happy with how it is, and I’m also hoping that we’re able to release a specific cover or two, one of which I had covered on my YouTube channel.

 

I guess, what I’m trying to say with this entire story of explanation is that a lot of people have come to me, knowing how I am, where I come from in a mental position, and tell me that they’re glad I never gave up. The thing is, I did. For a long time, I did and I would have still kept giving up, but with 2018 now here, and my past buried where it needs to be, I believe this is an amazing opportunity to start fresh. A new perspective, a new idea for how I want to be perceived – in a way, Reborn. So, that’s where I’ve been for the last 5 years, how I came about creating Reborn, and how the title came to be as well. I’m really happy with how the album is turning out, and I believe that even though some of the songs may sound sad – the lyrics really speak volumes about not giving up, about suicide prevention, about loving once again and lastly, about breathing in this thing we call life and finding the light.

 

Thank you guys, and I truly hope you’ll enjoy what I’ll have to share when this comes out!