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Artist Statement:

The three of us began our musical journey together in 10th Grade Rock Band class. Each of us was still coming into our own musical identities, but we found kinship in covering our favorite artists—everything from Guns N’ Roses to the Revivalists. 

While covering songs was fun, we always yearned for more. As we grew more comfortable as a group, we set our sights on a new goal: to write our own music.

“Underwater” is the culmination of that dream and almost two years of hard work. Our very first musical ideas originated in August of 2019. The song has evolved so much since then, and we have evolved along with it. With every recording session and late-night Zoom band meeting, we each became more communicative, creative, and determined.

In the end, “Underwater” turned out exactly as it should have: as a monument to our musical growth up to this moment. We hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed creating it.

Credits:

Co-composed by Jack T, Zander and Luc
Album artwork by Lia

Jack T (guitars, vocals, production)
Zander (keyboards, vocals)
Luc (drums)

Artist Statement:

We wanted to highlight our separate strengths; Miles’s piano, Leilani’s vocals, and Sophie’s vocals, bass, and guitar. We all play more than one instrument, so we had multiple layers of us playing different instruments. Sophie also added a bassline and vocal harmonies. Our biggest challenge was trying to put together a complete song with all the instruments when we couldn’t all play and sing in a room together. Every single instrument had to be recorded separately, and even though this is something some of us were semi-used to, it was not normal practice for us. When trying to finalize our recordings, almost every single vocal track had some sort of noise bleed in the background (the echo of some other instrument). So all the way to the end of the process was re-recording all the messed-up tracks and having to fix the errors that arose when we tried to use Soundtrap. One of our main challenges was with only being in person once a week. We could practice at home, but we did most of our recording at school, so we didn’t have much time. We were also sharing the space with other groups so we had to take turns recording, and there was often a lot of background noise. 

Credits:

Femme Fetale was originally composed by The Velvet Underground

Sophie (vocals, guitars, bass)

Miles (keyboards)

Leilani (vocals)

Jack T & Charlton St. Studio (engineering & production)

Artist Statement:

We wanted to create music that we enjoy. We loved making these two songs because we love the original music and we wanted to see if we could replicate it with our own twist on it. For High and Dry we did a couple takes of us running through the entire song all together. Then we went home and overdubbed our parts individually.

Then for telephones we recorded our parts individually and tracked them out. We then re-recorded and cleaned up the parts, and added a chorus pad in the background for space and similarity to the original song. Then we mixed the instrumental and Armant recorded vocals, added effects, some ad-libs and oohh’s. Then… it was done.

Credits:

High and Dry was originally composed by Radiohead

Armant (vocals)

Will (acoustic guitar)

Levi (bass, production)

Spencer (electric guitar)

Charlton St. Studio (drums)

Telephones was originally composed by The Vacations

Armant (vocals, production)

Levi (guitar, production)

Will (bass, production)

Artist Statement:

These two songs are called Text Me Back and Snow Montreal, two songs that demonstrate our ability to mix vocals and sing. Text Me Back is about a story of two teenagers who can’t seem to reach out to their loved ones. This song’s intense reverb reflects our thoughts and feelings bouncing around our head, similar to vocals bouncing across a big room. Snow Montreal is about a breakup during the wintertime our sound and lyrics represent our feelings being frozen in time, like snow on a cold winter day. The instrumentals we chose encapture emotional stories that we wanted to share through music. At the beginning of the projects, we wrote lyrics and recorded our vocals. This process was the easiest part of making the songs as we had experience writing lyrics and singing in the past. All we did was play the beat on a loop as we both took turns freestyling.

Once we both freestyle melodies and lyrics, we listened back to our vocals to pick and chose the melodies and words we wanted to keep. However, mixing the songs took us out of our comfort zone. We were forced to learn how to add effects that complimented each other while continuing to try and tell our stories. We used Youtube, as well as the help of our teacher, to learn and grow during this process. Throughout the pandemic, recording and sending tracks back and forth was difficult. We used facetime and zoom to collaborate and share ideas. We also used the ability to share each other’s screens on Zoom when mixing the song, allowing us both to have equal say in what went into the final product. 

Credits:

Co-written and produced by Julien and Marlowe using Pro Tools

Artist Statement

Welcome! This is a cover of the unreleased song by Clairo called Lying Has to Stop. I took inspiration from the cover she chose for this song, Monet’s water lilies. I wanted to make my project sound like what this painting looked like through weird synths, fun riffs, and playing around with the key that the song is in. Throughout my own process, trial and error was the main source of production and flow of it all. Trying out new instrument sounds on Logic (a recording app), whether it be adding in certain harmonies and seeing if those work, or just pushing random buttons to see what they do. Overall this journey helped me discover a whole new layer of what mainstream artists go through when putting together a song and how it’s really not as easy as it seems. Especially with deadlines since my peers and I didn’t always have access to the school’s recording studio and instruments whenever we needed. So our projects required major planning and organization if we wanted to make sure we got everything done. Also, I’d like to add that making music on its own is a challenge, but adding a pandemic on top of everything else adds a whole new level of conflicts. I really hope you enjoy this cover, stay safe and healthy!

Credits:

Originally composed by Clairo

Instruments, vocals, MIDI programming and production by Anonymous (10th grade)

Artist Statement:

Over Winter break I found myself completely immersed in the works of Danny Elfman, starting with his band from the 80s, Oingo Boingo, and then moving to watching many of the movies he scored. These movies were some of my favorites when I was younger. The music from the movies have always captured me. As I started playing music, I gained an even greater appreciation for scores. Whether it be the hauntingly beautiful scores of Corpse Bride (2005), or the whimsicle world of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), I found that I couldn’t stop listening to them.  This led me down a rabbit hole of the question “what is it like to write scores for films?” I watched interviews, stared at the $180 price tag on Elfman’s Masterclass, and ultimately decided to just try out composing by myself.

I hadn’t composed anything since my 6th grade music class, so I wasn’t going in with experience or knowledge. I downloaded Musescore and jumped right in. Musescore is a program where you can write sheet music and listen back to it using MIDI files for different instruments generated by the program. I worked for a few hours over break just composing a random piece, and I was pretty satisfied with it (considering my lack of experience and time spent on it). I really enjoyed the process, so I knew that I wanted to try composing something in music class where I would have more help and time.

For this project, I wanted to try choosing a film scene and composing over it so that my inspiration could come from somewhere more grounded. I decided to go with the opening scene from Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012). It’s one of my favorite movies, and I know the score forwards and backwards, so I thought it would be interesting to see what I would compose on my own. There were a few aspects of the original score that I wanted to keep consistent with mine. I knew that I wanted to keep the orchestral tone, and I wanted the bulk of the instruments to come in when the character Suzy looks directly at the camera. With those ideas in mind, I wrote out a small shot breakdown and I watched the scene without sound over and over, writing down ideas that I had.

In the end, I didn’t use a lot of these initial ideas, but they really helped me start somewhere. Throughout the next week, I spent some time laying ideas down, but I ended up scrapping most of them. They just didn’t seem to fit the scene. In the last week of January, I ended coming up with a melody that I liked. I actually wrote the ending first, since that was where the main melody really came in. I added some instruments like guitar, violin, clarinet, flute, and oboe to get my main melody and background parts down. During the following week, I had a lack of ideas, and I didn’t enjoy anything I was writing. I watched some interviews with film composers to try and get some inspiration. There was a video by the Hollywood Reporter where Hans Zimmer, Terence Blanchard & Ludwig Göransson sat down and talked about each other’s work, and I found it really interesting and informative.

When I came in the next week, I was ready to get to work on the introduction. I spent some time choosing my instruments here. I wanted to make sure that the instruments and structure of the piece really related to the movie. The scene I was writing for only had a few characters — Suzy Bishop and her younger brothers. I wanted the intro to build up as more characters entered the rooms. The scene starts with one of the brothers sitting by himself. Because of this, I decided to start with a single xylophone to get a child-like tone. Next, I wanted to add a part to the intro that would represent Suzy as a character. For this, I really looked at the plot of the movie. In the most basic terms, the movie is about Suzy’s defiance of her family. Because of this, I decided to have an acoustic guitar play the same melody as the xylophone, but a few measures later, creating a round. I chose the guitar because I feel like the acoustic guitar still has a child-like sound, but more mature than a xylophone.

I spent some time syncing my score with the video so I could map out exactly how many measures I would have to fill, and where I wanted to add some notes/parts that matched up with the visuals.

After I mapped out all of the measures, I started filling the rest in, continuing the round and making slight variations to the intro melody that would eventually build up to the main melody. I added another xylophone playing along with the first one to match up with the part of the scene where all of the brothers are in a room together. In the movie, we never get much of a distinction between the brothers, so I thought it would be fitting for them to play the same part together. After I lined up the measures, it was easy for me to find out where I wanted to add small details. For example, I added a triangle when one of the brothers poked his head out of the door frame, and I could line up Suzy’s guitar melody. 

The next weeks were spent adding instruments, taking instruments away, filling in parts, and re-writing parts that I didn’t feel fit too well. At this point, I also had my sister listen to the playback to get some fresh ears. She pointed out which instruments she thought fit, and which parts she thought I could add. 

Once I had the structure of the score done, I moved on to playing around with dynamics and articulations. The dynamics took me a while to work out, partly because of my indecision, and partly because I was still learning how to use Musescore. After a lot of listening and tweaking, I finally finished the writing of the score. I exported the parts, and Nick put them into Logic to give the audio files a little more spice. Since I don’t have violins and oboes, I was using the MIDI files through Musescore to get a final product, so Nick played around with them a bit to give them some more life and depth. Once it was done, I lined up the video and audio, and I was done!

Credits:

Composed, edited and produced by Gwen