2021: The Year of Growth
2021 was definitely a year of growth for me. I stopped making shitty music for the validation of others and started making music for myself. Music that I would enjoy. I got the full version of FL Studio 20 and a new microphone + interface and just started working like a dog. I would listen to 100s of beats per day and from those 100s, I would only like about 20 at most. From those 20, I would only use 1. And that’s still the rigorous process that I use to this day. I get people asking me all the time where find these beats and I just say YouTube. There are so many talented producers on there and they could be found if you’re just willing to put in the effort. But back to the timeline, this is when I started working on ‘329’. I went from mainly rapping to trying to get more into singing and this project was my attempt at doing that. I started by working on both “Maelstrom” and “Starborn” at the same time (both produced by eeryskies.) The beats were the same BPM so I tried combining them and just making one long song but when that didn’t work out, I cut it in half and started working on Maelstrom. The first idea I remember coming up with was following the guitar melody in the background (starts at 1:16) and I kind of just worked forward from that. The intro verse came later on and that one was a freestyle that I did in one take. I then cleaned it up a bit and maybe changed one or two lines but the intro is like 95% a freestyle. When I finished Maelstrom, I immediately started to work on Starborn because I was just so inspired with this new sound and I didn’t want to let that feeling slip. Starborn kind of came easier to me than Maelstrom did in that most of it was freestyled. Firstly, I wanted to make it feel like the antithesis to Maelstrom so to set a darker tone, I lowered the pitch of the beat by 3 semitones. Then after I heard how the beat sounded after that, it was wraps. The chorus was written and prepared but the “When I say too much and it never even matters” line, the background vocals, and the verse were all freestyled. The rest just came down to how I mixed it and what I added to the already amazing instrumental so what I ended up doing was drowning my vocals in reverb, adding the risers that swirl back and forth at the end of the second chorus, and my favorite part, slowing down the guitar solo at the end to make it feel more ethereal for lack of a better word. Starborn is still one of those songs that I play very often because I just love the sound of it and falling asleep to it is a different experience. If you haven’t tried it yet, please do. Anyways next came “lover’s interlude”. This one’s interesting because I literally finished the song exactly how you hear it the same day I found the beat. And that day just so happened to be the very same day that Fantom uploaded the beat. I don’t know what else to say. I was inspired. Next came “Desert Red” (also produced by eeryskies.) The title came from the name of the beat that eeryskies. gave it. I liked the term so I started freestyling to the beat and got the idea for the chorus and my first verse. I texted Smoke to put a verse on the song because I knew it was going to end up being a rap song and we meshed very well at the time so putting him on it just felt like a no-brainer. After he sent his verse in and I mixed it and put it on the beat, I knew I couldn’t let it slide cause he did very well on his verse so I had to bring some heat of my own. And I did. And the song ended up being one of my favorites for the longest because the vibe was so warm but the song was so hard at the same time. It was this dichotomy of vibes and feelings that took me aback at the time. After I finished Desert Red, I made “Goodbye, My Love”. It was kind of a similar process to how I made Starborn so I won’t get too far into it but I do want to point out that the guitar solo at the end is still one of, if not, my favorite outro to any of my songs. I planned on making 329 a full-fledged album with 8-9 tracks but I couldn’t finish the other songs by the March 29th release date. I had Goodbye, My Love ready by the time of the release date but I thought that if I put it at the end of the project, It would kill the pacing so I held off on it for now and stashed it away. I would end up releasing it alongside “We Are Infinite” and “Antigone” on the We Are Infinite EP (which is just the tail end of 329 so I saved you the trouble of imagining what that would sound like and put the ‘hidden release’ right here.) I would get to those songs right now but there’s some life shit happening!
So some day around mid April, I played in my first football game. Well, “played”. I’m using that word very loosely. I never played a snap that game but just being in that atmosphere made me want to keep playing and practicing to maybe be able to play in a game. I kept practicing and working out with the team. There was a stretch of 20 days during spring training called the “Tough 20” where you would have to show up every single day and practice. I came 19 out of the 20 days. The only reason I missed a day is because the day before I got my second COVID shot and I couldn’t even move the next day. It kind of pissed me off having to miss a day but fuck it we ball. I wish I could’ve stayed for the summer to practice with the team but before I even started working out with the team back in November, I had agreed to go to Oklahoma to visit some of my family members from Costa Rica that stay there. The only thing I would like to mention from that trip is that the first night I got there, I recorded ‘IN THE NIGHT’ with my cousin Yoel, who goes by the artist name “Novak”. During the trip we also recorded ‘TELLTALE LOVE STORY’. But after that trip, I came home and got right back to practicing with the team and I was out of shape conditioning-wise but I was thinner than when I left. The season was fun. We won the first game but lost every single one since then :) Thanks Unnamed Offensive Coordinator! You’re ass! Being on that team during that season taught me a few life lessons that I’ll carry with me forever. The absolute most important thing, however, is that being on this team led to my first performance. Let me explain.
