Author/Singer/Composer from Melbourne, Australia. I write Young Adult fantasy novels. I have two dogs. One is bigger than the other.
Alterworld Book Two: Ghost Of Ashes Progress (50,151 / 90,000)
On hold.
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After months of work - and, in the case of some songs, years of writing - I’m proud to finally show the world my double album, Light Shows and Shadow Puppets. If you can’t/don’t want to use Bandcamp, they’re available on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube Music Key and a bunch of others that I can’t remember off the top of my head right now.
I’ve also put the full albums up on YouTube ( Light Shows | Shadow Puppets ) and will be uploading lyrics videos of every individual song in the coming weeks. Also in the coming weeks I’ll be organising physical CDs of the double album. Stay tuned :)
ps: yeah, this means hey alice is on itunes now. finally.
Sorry if this is a weird ask, it probably is. If you remember about 3 years ago a rather annoying fourteen year old with bad depressing poetry lyrics asking to basically plagiarize your music? Well hi, I've grown up, still love your music, sorry if I was annoying back then, again, you probably don't remember because you probably have ya know, other things to remember than weird fourteen year olds from youtube comments. I re-found your music and i'm listening to it and falling in love again.
Hey wow, thanks! It’s not weird at all, don’t worry. To be honest I don’t quiiiiite know exactly who you are (I have a vague inkling but not much else), but that’s probably a good thing because the only wannabe plagiarists who really stick in my mind for years are the ones who are really awful (of which I could name two). So hey, thanks for asking first I guess :P
Anyway, thank you for your message! I’m really really glad you’re enjoying my music :) I can’t wait to show you some of the new stuff I’m working on, hopefully you’ll enjoy what I release in the next couple of months too.
I forgot I wrote this song. I was humming the harpsichord intro to myself and was really confused because I knew it wasn't Terezi's Theme but I couldn't figure it out.
Hi!...i love your music!Some of my favorites are "A Thousand Angels" and "Watch Out, You're Being Watched".I was wondering what inspires you to create the lyrics,because they tell such an amazing and mysterious story!
Hey there!!
Thank you! I hope you don’t mind the essay this is going to turn into lol. Also I realised I was answering the wrong question about halfway through but I promise I get to it in the end ahaha.
A Thousand Angels and Watch Out are inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion and Death Note respectively. I wish I could say something cooler than “I watched a lot of anime as a teen” but I can’t and that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
While I have quite a few songs that are obviously based in books and movies and so on (Hey Alice is self explanatory, Iron Children is one of several for The Hunger Games and Temporal Shenanigans is on the Homestuck soundtrack), that’s not to say I’m a straight up fandom musician to the exclusion of all else.
This is a hard question for me to answer because most of the time I struggle to remember my own creative process. That, and it can vary drastically from song to song. The one thing I can tell you is that the lyrics never ever come first. Even if I’ve got a general idea of where I want the song to go, I won’t come up with more than a line or two or a couple of sentence fragments before humming a melody to go with it. I’ve tried doing it the other way and it just doesn’t do anything for me.
When I deliberately set out to write a song (as opposed to accidentally coming up with bits and pieces and having to drop everything to sing them into Evernote, which happens pretty conveniently) I pretty much always know what kind of feel I’m going for. I noodle on that for a while.
The Experiment and Fall To Sleep are pretty good examples of this approach! They’re in no way related to any sort of fandom (though I’ve been told that The Experiment fits Maximum Ride pretty nicely, but I haven’t read it). I wrote both of them sitting in English class in school - Fall To Sleep in 2009 and The Experiment in 2010 - while imagining the music vaguely in my head. The piano introduction for Fall To Sleep is the entire reason I wrote that song, and it’s the entire reason the lyrics are the way they are. I thought to myself “what kind of lyrics would go with that piano riff?” and the obvious answer was “apocalypse, duh”.
But building a story song doesn’t really stop there. As I write I always think about how each line goes with the feel of the piece as a whole. I admit that there’s not much erasing of anything once it’s on the page - most of my songs as you hear them are exactly the same as they were first written, lyrically speaking. But I’m a bit of a perfectionist that doesn’t tend to write anything in the first place unless I think it’s great for the song.
I think I’ve been answering a question you never really asked here, but the inspiration for the song’s feeling is pretty different from song to song. For example, I woke up one morning and Hey Alice’s lyrics were written in my handwriting in my lyric book. I have nothing more than a vague recollection of turning on the light to scribble. And Fall To Sleep’s lyrics, as I’ve outlined, were pretty much all inspired by ‘what would be cool with this piano’. And also by being a bored daydreaming dork in class. That’s key.
A lot of people find huge success in drawing inspiration from specific events in their lives. I usually struggle with that. ‘Usually’ is a key word there because songs like Pushing and Song For A Boy (currently not on YouTube because dumb past me deleted them) were very much inspired by real (annoying) people. Plus, there are a couple of songs on the upcoming albums that focus on things that happened to me. But they’re still the exception.
And as much as I used to be heavily inspired by whatever media I happened to be glomming onto at the time, that isn’t happening so much nowadays. Not really sure why. Maybe I’m growing up? Maybe I’m getting boring? who knoooooows
But the one thing that is pretty solidly reliable for getting me to write really good lyrics is writing really good music to accompany it. So I guess this whole thing was a roundabout way of saying ‘it’s all about the music’ because as I said I’m a huge daydreamy dork
Thanks so much for stopping by anonymous! I’m sorry I’m not a concise person (that’s a lie I’m not that sorry). Have a wonderful day!! :)
Hello! I was wondering whether you've ever watched the anime Attack On Titan or read the manga? There are a few of your songs from your "Where's Your Wonderland" album that almost make me cry because of how beautifully they fit.
Hey there!
Yeah man, I'm up to date with the manga and it's one of my favourite series of all time. I only heard of it when the anime got super huge on Tumblr last year, so nothing from WYW is based on it, but there's at least one song on my upcoming album that's pretty heavily influenced by its themes :)
Some people on reddit are calling you the canon voice of Homestuck's Aradia due to Temporal Shenanigans. Do you have anything to say about this?
It's not canon.
I don't mind people headcanonning it at all though! If people asked me to record phrases as Aradia I probably would. But it's not the official voice. I never intended to make anyone think that.
I wish people wouldn't argue so much about it though. I mean, seriously.
Hi, I love your music & it's amazing what you do. Just a quick question, if you don't mind answer something personal; how did you get into composing music? And how would someone else get into the more mainstream composing scene? Thanks :)
Hi! Thank you so much! I don't mind answering at all!! :) You've given me an excuse to ramble. Good luck reading all of this, haha.
When I was in fourth grade, my best friend who I thought was infinitely cooler than me in a way I could never catch up (if you have ever been a child, you know the feeling) started writing pop songs (which were honestly remarkably good for a nine year old to have written; I still find myself humming one of the tunes on occasion). I joined in because I wanted to be awesome and cool like Steph.
The first song I ever penned was a blatant Nikki Webster ripoff. Maybe one day I'll record the damn thing. It's different enough that I can say 'so sue me' and not be scared of it actually happening.
I didn't really start writing again until I was a couple of years into high school (grades 7-12 in Australia). Somehow, I got it into my head that only ~amazing super geniuses~ could write songs. Not entirely sure how that happened but uh. That's how my brain worked. I have a couple of theories but that's about it.
I'd always wanted to be a singer (at one point in my childhood I'd wanted to be a singing Egyptologist, a fact that delighted my psychology teacher when it came up in conversation years later), but songwriting and production were these dark magical arts that weren't accessible to a pleb like me. It was some ridiculous circular logic bullshit, like a "the people who write songs are songwriters and how could I ever be a songwriter if I'm not a songwriter" type thing.
I distinctly remember queuing up outside a classroom chatting to a guy whose father is a successful musician (this is the same guy who asked me and a friend in year seven "why do you have to have characters") and I mentioned 'no, I can't write songs' because duh that's only for special people and I wasn't that particular brand of special. He made the most confused face and said "what do you mean you can't?", which threw me for a loop because isn't it obvious? I'm not magic enough??? I muttered out something completely dumb like "well I can write one song", because I'd been trying to despite the fact that it was clearly not something I was cool enough to do.
I started real singing lessons around this time.
There were four of us in one class and one of the exercises our teacher had us do was 'write a verse, then write a chorus, then another verse, add some chords' and uh suddenly I had written a whole song what??? How???? Did that happen???????
This song, Frost, was on my YouTube once upon a time. I really wish I hadn't deleted all of the old videos I once uploaded, amateurish as they were. I don't really remember why I did it. Probably because I was an insecure teenager just like everybody else lol.
Something about realising 'huh, I've just written a song, welp' was a huge breakthrough for me. After that I just kind of... kept writing. Another significant event for me was a camp run by that same singing school. We were told to write a song in an afternoon and I panicked, talked to some people for about an hour trying to figure out how the heckie they were so calm, shut myself in a room with a piano for five hours and wrote. Got the whole song done. That one, Out Of This Life Alive, was also on YouTube for a little while. Again, the upload is lost to the ether. I might upload it again if I can find the clip.
I should do that!!
Shortly later, my cousin introduced me to FL Studio. Up until that point the only computer music software I'd known about was Finale. I hate sheet music. I hate reading sheet music. More than that, I hate writing sheet music. Fuck that process with a red hot poker. So, as you might've inferred, that didn't work so good in my case.
All I'd been able to do was sing and accompany myself on the piano, 'til then. And most of the accompaniment just meant bashing out chords in a rhythm that sounded pretty okay with the singing. That was how I wrote most things, and it still feels like a better way of getting the bones of the song down, most of the time. There are notable exceptions (Temporal Shenanigans and a few tracks off of my upcoming album, but I'll talk about them when they come out).
But FL was pretty important for me. I could click and the sound was there. Woah. I made literally every early song on that. And then I exported each individual instrument as an audio file and imported them into Cubase so that I could record the vocals because I didn't know what the everloving bollocks I was doing. Temporal Shenanigans is pretty much the last example of that dumbass workflow I had going. Yes, that means the entirety of Where's Your Wonderland? suffered from this approach. Among other things.
But hey. It worked. In a manner of speaking.
As for instrumental stuff, I didn't get into that until near the very end of high school (2010). I wrote a couple of pieces, Citizens Of A Ghost Town and Seelie Twilight.
When I showed the former to friends, my ego had its figurative ass kicked. They tore it to shreds. Enthusiastically. And while I understand it isn't the world's best piece (nicer production and sounds would've taken it a hell of a long way but hey, I was also learning that too), my advice is not to show your work to people who will happily go 'this is bad, stick to things you've already gotten good at by sucking at them until you're good'. Those people suck. They probably eat dirt.
Citizens Of A Ghost Town was good enough to get me into a composing uni, though. It was an ego boost to get into the class (initially) but actually doing the damn degree? 0/10, would not recommend. Seller refuses to refund. Would not eBay again.
A couple of other students echo my sentiments on this one: I learned more about composing when I wasn't doing anything to do with the course. Once I finally got out (a year early because it was 'drop the course' or 'drop out of life', but hey they still gave me an Associate Degree and I got distinctions/high distinctions in most classes [including in that one class I never attended]), my rate of improvement pretty much immediately skyrocketed back to what it was pre-uni.
So um. Don't do what I did there.
And after all that, I still haven't answered the second part of your question!!
To be honest, I'm not a hundred percent sure what you mean by the mainstream composing scene.
But to get into composing itself? I'm going to do the lame and annoying thing and say just do it. You play an instrument, right? If it's guitar or piano, nut out some chords you like. Hum something over the top, even if you're not a singer. If you're playing piano, keep playing the chords in the bass while you tinker with a melody up top.
The first things you make won't be great but you have to get past that. The first piano piece I ever wrote (during that period in grade 4 where I wanted to be cool and awesome like my friend) was annoying. Really annoying. People were yelling at me to get off the damn piano, then yelling for the teacher to please make Rachel stop playing that oh my god.
After that, I wrote things that were clichéd and boring. Extremely derivative things that weren't bad, but just sounded like you'd heard them a hundred times before (note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It becomes a problem when it's the only thing).
Remember Seelie Twilight and Citizens Of A Ghost Town? Compare them to Planetarium, which was a year later, Indigo Archer/Mechani% from two years later, and to Arielle or Interplanetary, which were two and a half years after.
Then there's Global Paranormal Intelligence Agency, which I wrote almost exactly three years after Citizens Of A Ghost Town.
Hell, just take a wander through my YouTube channel in order of date uploaded. You'll get to watch how progress happens.
I've been writing this and backspacing and retyping a lot for a few hours so I think I'll wrap it up here before I make life any more confusing for anybody. As always, please let me know if I've been dumb and unhelpful haha. Good luck in your musical endeavours!!! :)
Hi! :) I love your music! I'm currently studying 6th grade AMEB Musicianship and was wondering how the classical/choral style harmony and melody writing they teach there can help me write modern-sounding songs? Because this kind of harmony is all pretty and follows all the traditional rules like no dissonances and no parallel octaves or fifths and whatnot, but how much of modern music is built on traditional harmony, and how can I change my style of composing to a more modern style? Thanks. :)
Hi anonymous!
Sorry it's taken me a couple of days to answer, I've been trying to figure out what to say this whole time.
Congratulations on getting to 6th grade AMEB!! That's higher than I ever got, that takes dedication! I had to study counterpoint in uni though, so I know what you're talking about.
All of modern music is, in one roundabout way or another, built on traditional harmony. As in, it's evolved from those strict rules that were all the rage once upon a time. It's just had hundreds of years to do that, so you might not see the connection between Linkin Park and anonymous monks but you can't have the former without the latter.
That said, chuck the rules. Once you've studied them, you know them, you know what they sound like, what kind of feeling each musical idea evokes. If it suits the piece you're writing, you can use them as a tool for a perfect counterpoint line, if that's what you want. Or you can say 'haha stuff it' and use parallel fifths for your entire string line (I may or may not be speaking from experience here).
I think the best way learning counterpoint and all that jazz helps you in terms of modern music writing is it forces you to concentrate on harmony for a while. You've got no choice, you've got to think about how x note works with y note works with z note or you don't pass the exercise. And even if you never use that particular, specific ruleset again, you've still spent that time thinking and that still helps you, as well as all your other theory that you've learned.
I hope this makes sense! Let me know if it doesn't haha
A commissioned musical theme for a Homestuck fan planet, Land of Graves and Voltage! Click here for commission details if you're interested. If not, I'm not the boss of you.
Over the course of the next few days, I’ll be uploading ALL of the artwork that was sent to me for the EP. You guys are gonna get to see the working process that the amazing Lucy Cooper went through to come to the final product.
That woman managed to decipher my insane ramblings. And for that, she deserves everything!
