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"Waste of my youth" EP release - Anna & Julia

Today is a good day! My friend Julia and I are releasing a music collaboration that we’ve been working on for over 6 months. (Videos and links at the bottom of this blog post)***


Through everything, we’ve come out with three songs that are in memory of our friends and our final year at Mt.A. We lived in a house shared with three other amazing people and we really wanted to capture our experience living on Salem St. in the small town of Sackville, New Brunswick.


There’s a lot we want to share here but most importantly we want to document a little bit about the process of writing these songs, what they’re about, and the experience of bringing this project together. Like any project, things might seem simple from the outside. To publish a song, it might seem like it's just three basic steps: write, record, and upload. But behind a music release, execution is a product of the process. What we thought could be done in a few months actually took a lot longer due to our school schedule, geographical distance, and the nature of a music collaboration.


While creating art as a group can be slow and challenging, working on a project with someone makes the process more motivating and less daunting.



Starting with our main song “Iced tea”.


Julia says…

“When we were writing Iced Tea, I had a vision in my mind of two people lying under a shady tree and letting their thoughts wander. For me, it’s about the feeling of being with someone who makes you feel so comfortable that you forget you’re with anyone at all. I’ve been so lucky to have that sense of trust and comfort in some of my relationships in Sackville, and with the place itself.


Musically, this has a lot of Anna’s influence. Anna has a special talent for melancholy in her music, and her piano part was the perfect foundation for writing a bittersweet love letter to people and places of comfort.”


Anna says...

“Like "Orange", this song was written in the living room of our shared university house in Sackville, New Brunswick. The basic melody and a few of the lyrics (like the first stanza) were written on November 4th, 2020 when Julia brought over her electronic piano. In terms of writing the lyrics, during our writing sessions, we were surrounded by many sources of inspiration to capture that light summer shade feeling. At the time, we had many windows in the house, the kitchen had a view directly looking out to our neighbour (we could see who was coming and going), and we were both talking about Timothée Chalamet which led us to talking about the imagery from Call me by your name. Subconsciously, our EP cover of the sky also looks similar to the poster for the Call me by your name movie. I think when I look back to this song in the future (especially alongside the music video), it’s going to be very nostalgic.”





Now on to our second song “Orange”


Julia says…

“Orange was the first song we wrote that we managed to finish. We had tried to write a few songs in the weeks before, but we kept hitting dead ends. With Orange, we finally found our groove, and it felt so good! When a writing process really flows, I always feel like I’m uncovering a song rather than writing it, and that’s what writing Orange felt like to me. The process was completely collaborative. If I didn’t know where to go next, Anna would take it somewhere I never would have gone, and vice-versa. The result was a song that neither me or Anna would have written on our own.


One of the beautiful parts of this project has been that the songs mean slightly different things to each of us. For the lyrics, we worked off of some common images and feelings, like the sun setting in a gray city. For me right now, it’s about the loneliness of both endings and beginnings. It makes me think of relationships that couldn’t work, and accepting that two people who love each other need different things. And, especially now that I’m moving to a big gray city (and terrified to do it), it’s about the loneliness of starting over.”


Anna says…

“This was the first song we wrote for what would turn into this EP. We experimented with different tunes but the melody fell into place quite naturally when we wrote it all in one night. After just 3 hours of songwriting, the basic foundation of our song was complete and because of the organicness of the song, I see this song to have a raw authenticity to it. This song was probably the most instinctive song on the EP which makes this song more unique from the others. In the process of writing the lyrics and capturing an “Orange” imagery, we took inspiration from pictures of sunsets, the Hudson River, New York apartments, and paintings of oranges by the artist Erika Lee Sears. Overall this song wouldn’t have been possible without Julia’s folk influence and great guitar playing. Lastly, I want to mention the ending where Julia improvised a closing solo. This part is one of my favorite parts of the song and I’m super glad Julia added just to fill space during the editing process. Really like the ending."



Finally on to our last song “Waste of my youth”.


Julia says…

“This song was unlike anything I’ve written before. Anna did an amazing job on production and made this a bop! We were lost for a while there, but I’m glad we stuck with it. For two people who write mostly slow, sad songs, it’s basically a miracle that we managed to squeeze out this up-tempo tune!


Lyrically, I love the specificity of this song. To me, it’s about the expectation to live a certain way and do certain things while you’re young, and how the lockdown has interrupted those expectations. On one hand, I’ve been scared that the best is all behind me, and even felt a sense of injustice that the universe has taken away a time of my life that I can never get back (I know, a little dramatic). On the other hand, I still have so much. I hope I can listen back to this song and remember all the little joys about this time, like dressing up for themed parties, walking back home from the library in the moonlight, our house all lit up in warm colours, and writing this EP.”


Anna says…

“I am VERY happy this song came through. As Julia mentioned, there were more challenges with putting this song together. The song always felt like it was missing something but we didn't know what it was. There was a lot of back and forth and zoom calls on how this song could sound more full. When a new instrumental was added, it seemed to fix one problem but opened up a new problem. To give a picture this song has 35+ tracks (different layers/instruments/voices)! In terms of theme, for me this song captures the small quirks of Sackville, like the sound of the train whistling in the middle of the night, Salem Street, the Thunder and Lightening club (that was unfortunately closed during COVID), and the wide-open sky.”





Here’s what we learned/took away from this project.


Julia says…

“My advice would be to show your own creative ideas the kindness and curiosity you would for someone else’s. When I’m writing alone, I often end up judging myself pre-maturely. Some of the best parts of the EP started as an idea one of us was ready to throw away. I think sometimes it’s easier to see the potential in someone else’s ideas than our own. Sharing creative ideas in their infancy can be so vulnerable, but doing it has helped me explore ideas I might normally throw out right away. On a related note, I would highly recommend collaborating with other musicians, even just as an exercise if for nothing else.”


Anna says…

“I have two main lessons that I learned. First, prior to this collab I knew that music projects usually take a lot of time to make than initially planned but I didn’t think it was possible to still be motivated after 6+ months of working on a song. I think collaborating with someone allows for more long-term projects to continue, compared to solo projects where motivation can be lost after a month. Julia was so fun to collab with and we motivated each other by sharing clips back and forth. Second, I learned that a song that seems hopeless for months could potentially have a light at the end of the tunnel if you keep working on it. I’m sure there are some songs that you could work on for months that just don’t go anywhere but it might pay off to be patient with some songs. In the past, I usually let a song sit for about a month before deciding whether it's worth going through the process of production. This project showed me that you can potentially form a song into you truly enjoy listening to with time and lots of experimentation.”





Any future projects?


Julia says...

“Working with Anna, I have learned so much about recording and production, and it’s given me new confidence to pursue my own projects. It’s also made me more comfortable with the (slightly terrifying) idea of sharing my music publicly, which I’ve never done before. This summer, I plan to record some of the songs I’ve written over the past few years, for an EP release in late summer or fall.”


Anna says…

“Yeah, I’m hopefully going to release a few more songs over this summer. I think there will be a few more solo releases here and there rather than a big drop at once but if suddenly inspiration hits, then maybe an ep! We will see how the summer goes...”


~~~

You can listen to "Waste of my youth" on Youtube and Bandcamp. Here are the links:


For our personal music accounts:

Julia Youtube: Coming soon~















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