Note from Riri: this is a monstrous two-part essay with tons of exposition. If you’re a fan of tons of exposition, you can find Pt. 1 here.
Depending on the level of your experience, writing a song can feel very different. When you’re making your early steps in songwriting, you may be plagued by feelings of frustration and lack of direction. Having your first song come together is akin to having walked through a labyrinth blindfolded and somehow emerging on the other side in one piece.
As an inexperienced songwriter you generally write what writes itself. That is to say, you have as much control over how it comes out as you’d have flying a plane when you’d only ever learned to ride a bike. You think you’re writing a disco song? The song thinks differently: it’s a punk thing now! What are you gonna do about it?
The answer is frustratingly boring: keep writing. Well, and while you’re at it, keep listening, keep analysing what makes a song sound a certain way.
Five years after painstakingly putting my first song together in the course of three long weeks, I have finally arrived at the point where songs are coming out close to how I imagine them in my head.
It became apparent the moment I started writing for my solo project The Ririverse this January. Seeing my new songs turn out the way they do I’m still stunned at how little distortion there is to the original idea. I feel like I’m slowly taking control of a giant world machine and steering it with my bare mind.
A dejected subtone micro-ballad? - Check.
A self-pickup hope-wave cry with a dash of jazz? - Done.
Psychotic delusional pop-rock? - You bet!
Ok, on that note, for pure research purposes:
Even so, different songs are born differently. There are some that take lots of planing and need weeks if not months to germinate. I like to think of them as seeds silently turning to roots and leaves in the thick of the soil. It’s important to look at the soil with love and trust the growth is happening underneath.
And then there are the whirlwind songs - the ones that are thrust upon you from above, a true coup de foudre.1 These songs are born in an instant - and by an instant I mean mere hours from zero to done. They don’t ask and don’t knock - you open your eyes and they’re just there.
Such was this song. I remember planting a simple thought in my mind while cooking dinner after work:
I want to write a dance song that would express nothing but pure joy.
Throughout the next several weeks I would write down random phrases and word bits that felt like they fit. It was the kind of background work I do “out of the corner of my eye” for every song I write - nothing specific, just a mood board.
Fast forward several weeks. It was a Tuesday of another work week and I was seated at my office table vaguely planning a demo recording session for yet one more song I had just figured out. I stood up to get a tea and grazed my keyboard in passing. Plonk. Plonk. These chords sound dancy. What if I go here? Wait! What was that line I wrote down for the dance song?.. These two lines have the same rhythm - this is gonna be the bridge!..
Less than 24 hours later the song was written from first note to last. It had chord progressions of which I still don’t know how on earth they work, and not only do they work - they outright make me cry. Same goes for the lyrics: I usually have an extra hard time coming up with something light-hearted but these lyrics just came out of nowhere and were everything I hoped they would be.
Come Friday night, I jumped at my first scrap of free time and started laying down the demo in Ableton. I spent the entire weekend recording synth chords and vocals, coming up with a staccato bass line and something that was a whole new challenge for me - a self-made dance beat. A frugal demo, but it had to do - oh how I wanted to show this song to my friends and family! I’d written a dance hit!
I sent it out late that Sunday and spent the night tossing and turning, waiting for Monday morning to arrive. Upon waking up, I immediately checked my messengers - nothing. I called my mom. We had a casual conversation but she didn’t mention the song, until I asked directly.
“Oh, well, darling, to be honest I think this song is not dancy enough and not catchy enough”.
That wasn’t something I was expecting to hear, much less on a Monday morning, with 40 hours of office work ahead of me. I went through the day in a daze, anxiously waiting for what my dad would say. His verdict was even more disturbing:
“Well, the verse is ok, the chorus is pretty basic but the part in between - the bridge, I suppose? - I just don’t understand it. I can’t hear any melody there, it’s all like white noise. I guess mom and I just don’t get it”.
And this was my dance hit? A song that even my dad - a fan of obscure multiple-tiered complex harmonies, a guru of progressive rock - doesn’t understand?!
In the next couple of days I ended up showing the song to more people and the reaction was invariably cold. I had never experienced a scenario where I was sure I had struck gold and yet no one else was hearing it! I felt like I was positively out of my mind, a delusional train wreck.
The whole drama went on for about a week until I sheepishly showed the poor song to my producer friend. Upon hearing it for the first time he immediately said: “THIS IS A HIT!”
Then I relayed to him the wild experience of dissociation from reality I’d been put through in the week prior. He told me it’s generally a bad practice to show raw demos to people who aren’t professionally musically trained. Any shortcoming in the demo, any mixing mistake, any missing instrument or weird note - and they’ll deem the song in question a failure.
Granted, my dad used to play in a band himself in his twenties and therefore usually can follow and appreciate even the rawest of demos. But apparently this song was the one that got lost even on him.
My friend and I came to the conclusion that the balance of instruments in the demo was not ideal and the sophisticated harmony of the bridge got buried in the mix. It took a long heart-to-heart conversation and an oracle card spread to scratch me from the rock bottom I had hit, but we eventually proceeded to add some more pronounced synths to the song and made the bass line more present.
When my dad asked me to hear the demo once again, I shakily showed him the new version - still far from being done, but with a way better balance. He listened closely and I saw wrinkles form at the corners of his eyes.
“I get it now! - he said. - It’s a dance hit! A sophisticated one!”
French for “thunder strike” but metaphorically also means “love at first sight”.
Oh no, I can’t imagine the state your nerves must’ve been in until you could finally share all that hard work with a professional. I’m glad it made it to the right ears. If you ever post it, let me know, I’d love to hear it.
Riri, this hit a little too close to home. Your dad didn’t get your song - mine was rejected by my 16-year-old son with the sort of dead-eyed shrug usually reserved for lukewarm leftovers. In fairness, I may have leaned too hard into the experimental side of Lee Ranaldo’s back catalogue.
But what you’ve captured so beautifully here is that maddening limbo between what a song feels like when it arrives fully formed - and the blank stares it sometimes earns. As Jeff Tweedy says, “No work of art is ever finished; it can only be abandoned in an interesting place.” Yours isn’t abandoned. It’s just ahead of its time.