Lackhoney

11.14.20 //

my favorite song ive ever made.

it was an unexciting saturday morning in my south florida suburb. id spent the majority of my life moving around but this specific street had been around for enough years to start to feel like home. if youd had live footage of my street at 6:00 am, youd see a series of peaceful front lawns and one with a flurry of movement. a little guy (me) excitedly shoving every last household item into my car as i prepped myself for the 14 hour drive to nashville.

months before, i received what i had interpreted as a series of divine signs to take a chance on myself. id saved up some money that i hoped would sustain me for the following year. i was going to go after music full time for the first time ever.

id arranged to stay in a friends spare bedroom for cheap. my plan was to deliver food a few hours each day and work on music the rest of the time.

i promised my parents that if i didnt make it big in a year, id move back home and take up my career as an airline pilot that id put on hold for music. i didnt think id have to, id always believed so deeply in my ability to make shit shake. 


the next 12 months were some of the most blissful and painful months of my life.

the best moments: i made music with people id looked up to for years, made huge strides towards finding an audience, and found a new community in web3.

the worst moments: a lot of shame, feeling like id disappointed the people closest to me, spending nights paralyzed unable to figure out my next steps.

on month 11, i was processing the impending reality that despite all my progress and work i wouldnt be able to make my 1 year deadline. 

i had to readjust. 

[lyrics]

i thought id be famous by the time november came and i was nowhere
hard for me to justify another year of falling, i caught no air

but i jumped off the edge
and its hard for me to save face in front of my parents friends
hold me im coming down
jumped off the edge
and this regular life shits got me upside down
will you stay with me?
im readjusting.

i was never pretty boy, hard boy, or a sad one
the whole time, i was scared to fit in clichs
my family waiting for me to come back home
being a golden child or disappointments all i know
graduated, good grades and a good school 
couldve made 100k but refused to
im never trying to do some shit that i dont love
my daddy said im childish and its not enough

jumped off the edge
and its hard for me to save face in front of my parents friends
hold me im coming down
jumped off the edge
and this regular life shits got me upside down
will you stay with me?
im readjusting.

[credits]

written/recorded/mixed/mastered by me

co-produced by me and beep (my best friend)

art by me, photo by trent

READJUSTING #19

READJUSTING #20

READJUSTING #21

READJUSTING #22

READJUSTING #23

READJUSTING #24

READJUSTING #25

executive produced by sunny b aka bizzle bizz

this song is so insane to me, and the best part is how its creation was such a journey

pt. 1 conception (5.18.22)

mood swings started may 18, 2022 when i had an in-person session with rohan (roho), we had already made two or three songs together virtually but had never met in person and wow he is very tall. also one of the kindest, easiest to get along with, and most effortlessly talented people i"ve worked with. we started the session the same way all my favorite sessions start, with about 2.5 hours of talking. i think this was before eth went down such sweet and innocent times.

eventually, we started working and the first thing that rohan played was the piano chords, we went through a few versions before we landed on the ones you hear (first time they come in is when i start rapping). he plays all his drums by hand on a keyboard, which is why they feel so human. i"ve seen very very very few people do it in person, and nobody as well as he does. he talks and makes jokes while he comes up with the craziest shit its insane. there are like 3-4 different drum patterns throughout this song its insane.

as the instrumental started to take shape i started having ideas for raps. i wrote a very long verse (cut it down by about 12 bars in the final version) and felt like i was truly in the "flow" for the first time in months. i had been struggling with feeling a lot of self-judgement whenever i created for a while but working with rohan unlocked a playfullness and free-spiritedness that i hadn"t tapped into for a while. kind of a similar feeling i get from yelling on twitter honestly.

i recorded my verse in one take as well as a hook idea that was very different from what this song ended up being. we left the session with a verse and a hook recorded and a super rough layout of the instrumental.

from there i took it home and worked on it that night, adding the distortion to the bass and developed out the arrangement and my vocal mix a little more. i was in my studio at my house with a couple friends who were gassing me up.

pt.2 may-july 
(forgot about the song)

it didn"t fit on the new album i"m working on so i just put it to the side and didn"t think i"d come back to it. i would listen to it from time to time and play it for people and the reactions were always super positive but i didn"t know where to "put" it in my discography.

pt.3 july 2022
i traveled 6 times from june 19th - july 26th and the song was finished while i was still living out of my suitcases

at this point jon and i had been talking about working for a couple of months, and i had sent him a different song i wanted him to get on. i think i had already sent this song to another artist and showed it to jon on a whim. but he connected with this one instantly and said he was writing to it.

a week or two passed and he sent me his vocals. i started working on them in miami and finished them in san antonio in sunny"s apartment. after i mixed his voice i spent a day or two changing the production around his verse to fit what he was saying. i recorded some vocals / adlibs over his verse to add to it and added that skit between hook2/verse2 while sunny was studying at her table.

at this point sunny b"s executive production really kicked in. she told me i needed a new hook, and made a few changes in production to jon"s verse and later mine. very key addition of the tire screeching sound in jon"s verse by bizzle. 

i bounced a version of the song with the hook taken out just so i could imagine new ideas in its place. sunny"s in medical school and is doing clinical rotations now so i dropped her off every morning at 5:55am. on the way back one morning i started playing "Mood Swings v.8 [no hook]". I wasn"t trying to write to it, but when the hook came around i started singing the melody for the new hook and i got really excited.

if u are reading this tweet "mood swiiingiiiinnggggg" and tag me or jon on twitter and one of us will send u a customized selfie response it"ll be great. this is to reward u for really reading this long-ass thing.

it came about really effortlessly after that. i wrote the hook parked in her car, playing the music too loud at 6am and spent the next hour or so figuring out how to record it, and deciding that the intro needed to just be the hook with the distorted bass.

a couple days later sunny mentioned how my verse felt too long and helped me pick out 8-12 bars that needed to get cut out. the pitched up swearing ending of the verse was always there with the beeps but it didn"t have context so i added in the "talk show" skit and that was pretty much the song.

boom shakalaka
-aly