Being an MD for “Music Box”
My experience as being a Musical Director is quite different from the other group members, as I will be performing on stage by myself. I produced the song by myself and will be performing it with live vocals and a backing track. “Music Box” is a dark song about a ballerina doll stuck in a music box. The ballerina stands for me, as an artist, and the music box is a metaphor for my life. I’ve written and produced this song in November of 2015. It is based on my own life experience.
Update: I’ve written the complete story line for the song. This will be included in the Track requirements document I’ve written for my song:
The intro has sound effects of a telephone calling tone, an answering machine and the sounds of the call being rejected. This is a representation of how the doll feels.
She was stuck there for 19 years, but only around that age she truly started developing feelings of frustration and incapacity due to self-sabotage. She is too judgemental of herself. The “morning” stated in the second verse is a metaphor to every beginning of everything she does. She cries every time she starts something new. She feels like everything she does and herself as well, are never good enough. If at least she had done things better beforehand, it would be easier to deal with the “morning”. In the third verse, she fakes (“I’m OK”) but she feels (“I’m really not”). In the fourth verse, when mentioning “the demons”, I’m referring to the ballerina’s own demons, the ones that live on her mind – her thoughts. The whole context before the first chorus is a demonstration of how vulnerable the doll feels at all times.
The chorus shows a fight between her good and bad thoughts, being vocally expressed through both speaking and whispering. It ends with her saying “such mixed feelings going through my head”, which means she doesn’t know which voice to follow, or what thoughts to believe in.
In the fifth verse, the ballerina sings “and there is no way around”, meaning that she’s lost in her own little space. She hopes to find her heart again, as it was before this whole chaos started. She consents that her heart is no longer a place of peace, but a battleground, of herself versus herself. Sixth verse, she lost her intention during the battle, but she notices she’s deceiving herself, by thinking she’s not in control. She starts then, in the seventh verse, believing a bit more in herself, affirming that her demons are like gravity, pushing her down and placing her “where she belongs”, not letting her move forward. Therefore, the doll becomes aware of the fact that she has the master key to the music box she is stuck inside of, she has the power to control her demons and free herself.
After the second chorus, there is a verse variant, a kind of bridge to an unfinished ending. The ballerina is now in control of herself. She stands in command of the music box, fights and defeats her demons and feels unstoppable, declaring she won’t be their toy anymore. But because this part of the song is a bridge leading to an incomplete conclusion, we will never know if she truly dominated her demons, or if she’s only deceiving herself once again (“To be continued”).
