ummmm idk about you but i absolutely despise madame yu. nothing wwx has done elicits the amount of hatred she put on him. literally if jiang fengmian and madame yu worked on their problems like reasonable adults and didn't project all of their marital issues onto their kids, half of the horrible things that happened to the yunmeng sibs would never have happened hhhhh
↬ sometimes the things we do know torment us more.
date: april 2019.
location: ash’s home studio.
word count: 1,824 words.
summary: overthinking.
notes: creative claims verification.
fittingly enough, the song was created almost entirely on a late night after far too much thinking with not very much to show from it.
night stretched out like a timeless void around ash as he sat in his new home studio. if his life wasn’t the way it was, ash might have been able to enjoy that feeling more than he did. even when the feeling of time being forgotten engulfed him, there was an always-present ticking clock ringing out in the recesses of his mind reminding him how little time he had until the peacefulness would break and he’d be expected to be somewhere he probably didn’t want to be doing something he probably didn’t want to do. days off didn’t really exist for idols. not for idols who were members of mega successful boy groups who were still trying to bury their string of career-threatening scandals behind them like ash was, at least.
if his life wasn’t the way it was, he also might enjoy this less instead, too. it was hard to say. in a different universe, he might not find such comfort in the silence of nothingness. it was a reprieve from the busy-ness of a neverending schedule and a contract still far too much time away from ending. there was a calm in the midst of the night that many didn’t get the opportunity to appreciate in the way ash did when his mind’s stubborn resistance to the gentle embrace of sleep kept him up and staring at a screen or a keyboard for hours on end.
as it was, he was tired and his mind was moving more slowly than any of the works in progress in his many folders demanded from him, so he opened up a new project and stared down the grey screen and assortment of settings and digital dials in front of him. without much thought, he tapped out a lagging beat into the program with one finger and then another, layering a minimalist scheme of snares and kicks over each other to achieve an effect he could consider listenable before adding in more texture through other instrumental affectations. he listened to it back, tapping his foot lazily to the slow beat that echoed back to him through his headphones.
the beat became the backbone of the song immediately. the steady percussional drag would be what the rest of the piece would be built on and he knew that from the instant it came together into a multi-layered piece of the puzzle. this was the essence of the story he wanted to tell. the rest would come. and so it did, with a willingness so rare in the creation of new music.
the word “chillhop” sprang to ash’s mind once he began layering a melody over it. it wasn’t a genre ash would have normally dove into so instinctively on such a dreary mind, but he’d heard enough late night playlists that were supposed to help him sleep and soothe his busy mind to identify how easily the beat would fall amongst the track list of one of them. instead of shying away from the association, ash leaned eagerly into it, keeping the additional instrumentals sparse at first. he could already hear in his head the vocals that would eventually lay on top of it. they’d be something part way between talking and singing, more introspective than trying to make a big statement to the world. they’d reflect the feeling in his mind at the very moment in time he composed the piece. distorted, barren, a little like a glimpse of the moon from behind the clouds on a night like the very one he was experiencing. he didn’t know whether his vision of the outside world that particular night matched the vision in his head—there were no windows to the outside in his studio for obvious reasons—, but the beauty of art was that it was creation, not a forced recreation. he could shape the song into how he had experienced the night instead of the objective facts of how it had been.
the music studio he was in, the one he could now officially call his own within the walls of the apartment he now had his name to, only his name to, was still unfamiliar in many ways. the new faux leather of the chair still created too much friction against the rough pockets of his jeans when he sat down after a long day and the lighting still felt a little off regardless of how many times he had moved around and switched out lighting fixtures. he’d have abandoned lighting altogether if he hadn’t had some concern left for the state it’d leave his vision in to state at a bright computer screen in the pitch black night after night.
it was a new but old feeling, sitting in a studio on a late night with only the mission to create something worthwhile in mind. at some point, he’d learned to find a bubble of comfort within the walls of bc entertainment headquarters, and that comfort had been the space inside any of the numerous open studios that were contained within the building. a studio of his own brought an entirely different kind of comfort. though he was only as literally alone in this studio as he usually had been in the ones down in gangnam, it felt lonelier in some abstract, indefinable way.
the loneliness manifested itself into a piano melody that ash first hummed and then played into the midi keyboard attached to his computer. it was a simple melody, only one line of notes extending into the silence. it didn’t fit over the beat he’d created, but after some toying around, he placed it at the beginning of the composition, examining the idea of it as an intro. normally, ash would consider it too long by several bars to be a fitting intro, but it felt right in a certain way for this song. this song could take its time to get where it needed to go. it didn’t need to rush into words and a plodding beat to achieve the feeling he was trying to express. when the intro ended, it would die out and be replaced by his own voice to avoid crowding the instrumental and allow it to keep a certain feeling of emptiness about it. he’d slowly incorporate it back in as his voice blended into the track as just another instrument.
that’s how the idea came to mind to integrate a sample of talking a couple of minutes into the song. it was like white noise, the hollow din of his own mind speaking out over everything else around him. he knew by now the concept the lyrics would explore—they’d take a trip into his thoughts on a late night like this when his mind was doing too much work for its own good and tearing itself apart in the process. it was so familiar a feeling he wasn’t sure why he hadn’t written more directly about it before.
after the piano played out its mellow intro, he chose to begin with a lament of the neverending night and how easy it was to get lost in his own thoughts when no one was around. his thoughts, both the bad and the good, were ravenous for his attention in the dim glow of his studio with nothing to push them away into the hidden corners of his mind of which they’d crawled out of on hands and knees. putting that into words only caused them to creep out even closer to the forefront of his brain.
even on the nights he had company, it wasn’t so easy to pull his mind back into the shallows instead of diving off the deep end. night was an occasion that brought an aura of somberness to everyone. an acceptance of fewer words could be found once the moon had risen. it was a phenomenon that interested him, a shared human experience he wished had been pinned down more clearly by psychology. he’d once read that sunlight triggered energy hormones in the human brain and perhaps that was why the depths of night were a much more lethargic occasion.
or maybe, the more likely answer was, he was overthinking once again, as he did so often. science wasn’t the place to look to explain his problems and his less favorable tendencies. ash wasn’t a superstitious person, but the sensation of being alone with his thoughts in the dead of night was one that felt, even to him, was owed a more mystical explanation.
or no explanation at all. there were answers that weren’t ever meant to be had. how boring life would be if everything could be deduced as easily as a math problem or science experiment.
once he managed to shake himself from his own stray path of thought, he wove it into his lyrics until they faded out into a repetitive drone. that didn’t feel like the end of the song he wanted, though. it was too dull and that was what he’d been going for in part, but it would only be a filler track if he ever put it on an album. it was the sort of song that would be forgotten as soon as it ended and he hated that thought. it didn’t need to be the song that made a huge emotional impact—that was never what it’s intended purpose had been—but it needed to linger in the listener’s mind for a bit like his own thoughts lingered within his head.
ash toyed around with the ending for a long time. a string orchestration was the first idea he had that felt truly right for what he was going for. it extended on and on and ash didn’t bother to cut it short for the sake of a concise song. he could do that later and trash it all if it was still off after everything. the strings reached a peak to peter out in a buzz of static as they turned into the gentle ticking of a clock once the orchestration had passed the minute and a half mark beyond the last spoken word. and yet it continued, distortion and ticking and droning in a symphony representing the inner workings of ash’s mind.
an interlude brought in the key player of silence as the droning cut out, the static died, leaving only an echoing clock accompanied by a returned piano tune to lull the listener into a false sense of comfort before it all kicked back in. metaphorically, it represented experiences ash had never been quite able to put into words and he didn’t think he’d be able to now either, so he left it as it was: a long, long outro, the end to a story, left unfinished with nothing but those eternal residual thoughts to dwell on.
