sepia

When I imagine my parents or grandparents growing up in the ‘olden days’, I can’t help but conjure up images in my mind of them living their lives in sepia tones. Obviously these imaginings are tinted by the photo albums filled with black and white or sepia photos of my young parents and grandparents, yet its hard to seperate the simpler colour palette in those captured moments from the reality that, actually, back in the ‘olden days’, the daylight, the colours, the sunshine, it was exactly the same as it is today. Even though it was before my time, I feel a certain nostalgia for those days as if the simpler colour palette represented simpler times compared to today’s complicated array of overwhelmingly vibrant tones and colours.  

Sometimes I feel like I have to work hard for a piece of music to come to life, but this time, at least initially, Sepia seemed to tumble out of my fingers and the skeleton of the piece was more or less complete in the space of an afternoon. It was early 2023, and my music room at the time had a window facing West so it captured the last of the sun before it dropped behind the hills. My piano sat against the opposite wall so as the sunlight poured into the room behind me it bounced off the floor and hit the shiny varnish of the piano below the keys. There are small gaps in between the piano keys where the light that was reflecting off the varnish was able to squeeze its way through, so as I was playing my fingers and hands were surrounded by this soft, golden hue that seemed to trigger a creative spark. 

My piano is quite an old soul, and it belonged to my grandma before she passed away in 2015 and my grandad gave it to me a few years later. I often think of her when I play my piano, yet this time felt different. The softness of the light around my hands and the warmth of the sun on my back must’ve enhanced my memories and feelings for my grandma and that nostalgia for the ‘olden days’. I imagined the smell of old books and musty photos frames, the gentle floating of dust particles through rays of sunlight pushing past weathered half-drawn curtains behind a lone, antique armchair.

By the end of that evening, I had the whole piano part and most of the violin part written on a piece of scruffily hand-drawn manuscript paper, and I eagerly asked Claire if she would play it with me. I don’t often write music in which the melody is played by an instrument other than a piano, but this particular melody needed a violin. After a couple of play throughs and some minor adjustments, Sepia was 80% done. Yet as per usual, the final 20% took over a year! There were several challenges to overcome on the journey to completion. Firstly, I was adamant that this piece needed to be in B major which is an awful key for a violinist to play in. With a bit of perseverance and and patience from both of us, we got the whole track recorded in jigsaw puzzle-like fashion. The next challenge was that I’d never recorded violin before so spent a long time figuring out how to make it sound as beautiful as it does in real life. Turns out a healthy amount of reverb will go a long way, and it fit the nostalgic vibe I was after. I quickly added a synth bass line to the middle section and loved how it sounded, but it made the beginning and end sections sound empty and I didn’t want a synth bass line to take away from the melancholic openness that already existed between the piano and violin. Out of nowhere, a wave of apathy for the song hit me. All motivation and inspiration for Sepia just disappeared and for the next few months it hung over me like a dark cloud that reaffirmed the belief that I can’t finish the projects I start. 

The irony was not lost on me that I work in a profession where I am often supporting, encouraging and challenging people to change their self-talk and to start overcoming challenges by saying ‘I can’ instead of ‘I can’t’. Yet here I was, finding all the evidence to support the idea that I can’t finish projects, and that there must be something wrong with me if I can’t bring myself to do one of the things I love most in the world. So I decided to walk the talk. I forced myself to sit at the computer and piano, I tried to change the way I thought about myself and Sepia, and I asked for help. Claire and Ryan, the two musical opinions I trust the most, offered the insight, reassurance, small tweaks and ideas that banished my apathetic feelings around this song. All Sepia needed was a subtle link between the piano and the violin, and this is what you can hear right at the beginning. It’s a lovely soft, dull synth pad that feels like when you don’t stir your hot chocolate and you get that rich dark layer at the bottom of your cup. This synth pad was to Sepia like a defibrillator is to a person in cardiac arrest; there was a spark and then there was life again! In a matter of hours, Sepia was done. 

A thought has just crept into my mind having just written all the above and I want to include it in here too. Producing Sepia was a challenge, both in a technical sense and also self-reflective kind of way. However, just like going on a hard mission in the outdoors, I chose to do it. I feel like I have a set amount of emotional energy to spend everyday, and the fact that the rest of my life allows me to spend a large portion of that emotional energy on something as inconsequential as creating a piece of music makes me feel very privileged and hugely grateful for my life and the people around me. I know that won’t always be the case, there will be times when my emotional energy will need to be directed towards more ‘real life’ situations, but right now I appreciate it. 

A lot.