What am I up to?
Hi friends! 💃🏾
I hope the fall season has not made you too gloomy yet – it is slowly starting to get to me, so I decided to write about an exciting topic! 😁
Writing songs… and the recording of my new project…(that is yet to be named!) 😅
I have always loved to write lyrics, poems, essays, etc. Putting them in music is a comfortable way for me to express myself more publicly. Unfortunately, the process to do so is not always super smooth.
For my first album, Rencontre{s}, the process was absolutely messy:
Some of my songs had been previously recorded for another project back in France, some songs are simple demos that I had recorded with my phone, some others have been produced by a friend… After a failure of meeting terms with the producers I was supposed to work with in Toronto, I ended up mixing and mastering the songs myself, during the pandemic, and learning on the go how to release a project on different platforms. It was a bit tedious, but it ended up working out well enough that I met incredible people thanks to that project. (the album came out early 2022 and is still available on all platforms with all of its flaws!) 🥳
My second recording experience was a lot smoother, even though it was a bit more stressful. I met with Matthew Isaacs and Justin Guanio a couple months after my album release, and we proceeded to start working on my EP Secret the Summer of the same year. Matthew is a very talented Rnb artist (Kromatix) and it was interesting to dive into the writing process with him. Justin (Wess) and him have been working together for a little while now. Contrary to how I usually work, Matthew and Justin like to start with finding a beat. After asking me what artists were inspiring to me, they came up with a couple of instrumental suggestions that I helped shape along the way. Once the instrumentals were done, we started writing lyrics and recording them in Justin’s studio (Loud Studios). This was the birth of Power, Stand Back, Fake Roses and Secret (listen here!) … Although quite stressful compared to my previous collaboration work, it was fun and refreshing to create with artists from a different genre. 🙏🏾
These past two months, I have been working on selecting, (re)writing, arranging and recording some songs for a new project! It is a solo project again, but I am much more comfortable with the tools that I am using now. All of the songs I have decided to record are songs that I wrote between March 2020 and now, these are fun, reflective and maybe thought-provoking songs that I want to share with the people who know me, and those who don’t know me yet.
As always, I am big on happy melodies that stick with your mind, and I truly hope this project will touch a lot of people. 🌎
I am using Ableton Live 11 to record, and I have been able to record my instruments from home, at a higher quality than for my first project. I am learning a lot about this software and am planning on attempting to mix my songs myself. For the vocals, I am also recording at home, with my brand new equipment!
Once I get my vocal tracks down, I will put them together with the instrumentals and start the final mixing process. I am not there yet, and it promises to be a big learning experience. One I will recount at a later date! 📝
In the meantime, I will release an acoustic version of the very first single off of this new project on my birthday:
Aftermath
December 7, 2023 – SAVE THE DATE!
Thanks for reading!
love, always.
