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What Inspired Mixed Signals?

If you know me, you know I love music. Recently, I released my first song, Mixed Signals. This was my entire year, because for the longest time, I wanted to delve into music myself, but I wasn’t really sure where to start. I spent months on end researching to develop a craft that I felt represented the pieces of me from now, and yet still encapsulate the sound and roots I had found and loved from when I was young. I started this in December or January, but took forever to finish it. I am nonetheless proud of it. I was inspired by a variation of artists, songs, movies, and just the world around me. Some of these songs have been longterm inspirations, or something that came out in the process and made me say WOW!

I feel like this one is very special to me. Not because I think it’s my best written song, or because the production or mixing and mastering is PHENOMENAL, but I think it marks a period in my life that says that things are real. I dedicated 4 months to learning how to produce better so that way I could get a closer sound, to my sound. That didn’t really happen with this one, but we’re on our way. The artifacts I used were songs that, I think, steered me in the right direction. Records, monologues, or visuals that when I see, hear, and feel, I say to myself, “I wish I was doing that. Well, maybe not quite that, but… similar.”  These are things I first saw when I was in elementary school, first getting a feel for art-culture with films like Palo Alto, or things I discovered last November, like Sabrina Claudio’s “About Time”.

I wonder if one day I will get to be in someone’s curation. That one day, someone will look up to me and my work, the way I look up to these people’s. The way I capture my life, the way they capture theirs. All I know, is that these people changed mine.

Sincerely,

Harry

I never understood Sabrina Claudio the first time I listened to her. I didn’t get it - who was she? And why was her sound so... different... from my expectations of who I thought she was.

I can’t really remember why I even listened to this song, or how I even found it, or why I even revisited About Time, the record it’s from, considering I really only liked maybe 3 songs. I just remember instantly falling in love with this particular song - her voice sounding different than usual, the lyricism, and the all around different sound from her. I followed up with that by going to read about it on Genius. What caught me was that she said it reminded her native land of Miami, and how she was challenged by her producer to step out of her usual comfort zone. I have never once visited Miami in my life, but for some reason, I could imagine it. The palm trees, warm air, and atmosphere of a permanent heat so blazing you forget to feel it. With records about Miami, they typically highlight drug use, or some sort of vacation, so this was so confusing (Miami - Kali Uchis, Miami - Nicki Minaj). It sure as hell drove me to listen, and fall in love with her other music.

I could almost feel her personal connection. I could feel the energy shift, compared to the other 11 songs. I was a fan before, I had even seen her live at the cancelled-midway Panorama festival. But things just never really clicked, with all of her projects, I felt like the standouts stood out, but while they were beautiful, bold, and vibrant, the other tracks felt like going nowhere on a rollercoaster, waiting for things to shoot up again. But this finally put all the puzzle pieces together.

I remember instantly opening up Logic, wanting to capture those feelings. I looked through my Notes app on my iPhone, wanting to see if I had anything. Unfortunately, the first song I made for it, didn’t really cut it. So, I opened up a file I had, looking to see if I had anything that sounded better. Instantly, the two were begging to be together, like Romeo and Juliet. I knew what I had to do. This was the main basis of the song I put out as my first song.

You know, the first time I had ever heard of Emma Roberts was when I was like 5 years old. I hadn’t really thought of her, like at all, until I had heard about “American Horror Story: Coven,” which changed that perception. She had grown up, and all of a sudden, I loved her attitude, style, and her as a person, all because of some character I had seen her play.

When I first heard the words “I wish I didn’t care about anything. But I do care, I care about everything too much,” I was taken aback. I had to find out who said that! Where was it from? It wasn’t even the words themselves, just more so the way they were said. They had a particular sadness to them.

10-year-old me did some research and found that they were from a movie called Palo Alto, which had no significance to me. At all. What the hell was a Palo Alto? I looked it up, and results for some place in California showed up. I was so confused, and then searched up “palo alto movie”, and then found out it was based on the town itself. I didn’t really care for the movie, but I still loved the audio from the particular clip itself.

In 2017, I took an audio production course, so that way I could advance in my audio production career. I kind of just sat there for a week of the two weeks, from 9-5, because I had no idea where to start. I couldn’t commit to an audio, I had no lyrics I liked, and wanted a fresh start, so I couldn’t recycle any Garageband projects. I was fooling around on the MIDI keyboard, and then I heard this really pretty ambient sound. I stacked a few chords on one another, and then you had it! But it was still missing something, and I was stumped what. But it HIT! I needed to use that sample.

Sadly, it didn’t really amount to much. But I still wanted to put it in something, the sample. It’s really beautiful to me. So, I loaded her voice into “Mixed Signals.” I couldn’t use it in the song because I don’t have the license, but I kept the file so I could reference it for later. Without it, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to go with the song.

The timing for Beyoncé to put Lemonade on streaming platforms (Apple Music, Spotify, etc.) was weirdly appropriate. I had just finished paying homage to that album for my art class by doing some sort of piece for it, which kinded consisted of me collaging the stills from the film and using writing and just kind of splattering it on the pictures. Then, in the midst of it all, Homecoming (her live Coachella film) was announced. I loved Lemonade a lot. I remember the day it was announced in 2016, dropped the following week on HBO, and watching the film and being in shock. It was an event! So 3 YEARS later, after all the Grammy hype, for it to drop, especially after she essentially said “I don’t need Spotify” on Everything is Love, it was incredibly random.

I was in the mixing stages of my song when this all happened. I remember getting the text that “SORRY ORIGINAL DEMO. HELP.” from my friend Angelo, and being kind of confused because we already had the 12 tracks. However, a gift came. When I first heard the demo, I was shocked, mainly because it was kind of the sound I wanted. I hadn’t really done that though. So I went back to change my final mix. Maybe I needed a synth somewhere, or a swell of some sort? I compared the two, the original and the demo. I also took the live version from Homecoming into consideration.

This demo really helped me get a clear vision for my own demos. I realized that although you could have a very drastic difference, as long as sonically you know where you want to go, it doesn’t matter as much as you may think it does, because where you start isn’t where you’ll finish. If you have a vision, execute it. That’s what she always does, and the final product is always flawless. (Homecoming has a 98 on Metacritic and Lemonade has a 92). Also, time isn’t a real constraint. She takes her sweet time to perfect things, but she always perfects them, real well. And that taught me ethic, which inspired me toward the end to make sure things are perfect, and what I like, always. No matter how long it may takes.

Iggy, Iggy, Iggy. Such a polarizing figure to the general public, from the time I was 9 or 10. I always liked her. At this point, when I got inspired by her, her “glory days” of number one hits and diamond singles like Fancy, Black Widow, Problem, were long gone under some “she’s whack” guise, but I didn’t care at all. Music is music. Whether it be her stellar visuals, or her live shows, I’ve always been inspired by her work ethic. I remember I sat in the audience for a live interview for AOL Build that she had to promote her EP, Survive the Summer, where she talked about how she has nineteen hour studio days.

Part of my ethic is that I do everything myself, which in itself is really time consuming. I am my own producer, mixing engineer, recording engineer, mastering engineer, and I am definitely my own vocals. I would always listen to this song to remember that. She talks about how she moved out at 16, all alone in the middle of Miami with no money, and just hustled and worked until her dreams came true. I’m obviously very fortunate to not be in that exact predicament, but I remember that if I work really hard at something, anything is possible. Although they say “the sky's the limit” is cliché, clichés exist for a reason, and I’ll never stop following that motto, because I wanna go past the sky.

With “Work”, I will never forget watching the video of Iggy performing at The Observatory in Orange County, and not only was the crowd SCREAMING her words and story back to her, but the video had over a million views. Over a million people wanted to see what they missed out on in the flesh, and wanted to relive it through someone’s lens. If she could do it, I can do it too, is what that video taught me. She pushed through her hardships, and although having to do everything by yourself makes things only about 5x harder because of all the hats you have to put on, I can push through something less demanding and circumstantial. Without her, maybe this song would have been done and put out, but maybe it would have taken years to put it out. This song taught me to always push through, and also taught me a way of brutally honest storytelling which I would have thought before was too literal.

The most common advice I received from every person in the music industry was to write from your experiences. Whether it be from singers, A&Rs, managers, or just people who have genuinely been in the music industry for years, they constantly said the same thing. But when I began writing, I didn’t have any experiences, until 2018. I paused making music as a producer, I paused writing, I paused THINKING. I had juiced my mind out of any ideas I had! I needed to live.

2018 was easily the most rewarding years of my life. In every area of my development as not only a person, but an artist, I had grown so much. I had a lot more friends. My personality was more developed. And best of all, I had more to talk about, whether it had been about being featured on an iHeartRadio show with one of my favorite artists, partying every weekend in Bushwick, or traveling to Chicago for a music festival with my best friends and being basically unattended, free to roam around and do ANYTHING (Lolla pics), I felt like I was finally where I wanted to be. The teenage experience I had dreamt about for years, that I had seen glamorized everywhere I looked when I was in preschool and elementary school was in my hands. I had my own sense of consciousness.

How this all ties in is funny, because the last thing on my mind was music. It was around me all the time, with concerts (confirmation receipt), events I would go to, and just my friends always blaring it wherever we would go. It was constantly surrounding me, and I channeled all the leftover energy I had from the summer into my own music when I had finally winded down enough to sit down and decide what I really want. How badly I want to be in that position, where people include me in their own curations.

So all the friendships I made and broke, the music, the parties, the sounds around me, it all went into a big mixing pot, and it spewed out with this song. My friends were the bane of my existence in 2018. I was never without them, every step of the way. Everything I did, it was for them. I could never have written anything, came up with another melody, or even thought of anything without them. They changed my life, so now I can change someone elses with my work. They are Mixed Signals.