#composer procrastinating

Four music releases, a music video, a trailer and my usual day job... October was a blur, easily the busiest month I've wrangled in a long time. I really should learn my lesson not to leave everything until the last minute, though I guess when you're juggling so many projects, the last minute is usually the only time you really have.

So the long-awaited remaster of 'Mania' was released as somewhat of a surprise on October 31st. It's actually one of our November releases, alongside its sister song Sleep, but it felt like popping it out a few days early was very fitting. Halloween is always pretty crazy for us plays-wise, as we're on a lot of Halloween playlists, so it gave the song a chance to get added onto a few.

It might seem somewhat strange having a remaster of a song that was only released a few years ago, but to understand a bit better, you really have to realise how Gloom and I work when it comes to music. Back in the old days, we took this a lot less seriously and we mouth doodled a lot of stuff. We'd have ideas for songs at 3am that would float around for months, perhaps years, being picked back up and resculpted, reworked, sometimes even abandoned and then rediscovered, until we'd eventually be somewhat (ish) happy enough to call it done and share it with the world.

Mania started out this way as a ditty called 'luv.mp3' sixteen years ago, around the same time as Blood and Bones and Unhealthy Obsession came into existence. We'd been working on the idea of this 'serious' song, and I'd written an instrumental that was a little darker than usual that Gloom had sung over.

This was back in the era of duvet covers over heads and singing into closets to try to get a slightly better sound out of $20 microphones being recorded in spare bedrooms (or sometimes kitchens), and baking them in lots of delay and reverb to hide the imperfections. I also had this amazing ability to save everything as 96kbps mp3 files. All of that is to say that much of our older music sounds a little rough around the edges. 'Luv' went through a few iterations and Gloom had actually recorded three verses (one of which never made it to the final song, but that's an mp3 for another time), though it was outwitted by our uncanny ability to become distracted, either by something new and shiny or by real-life rearing its head. It got filed away in the archive and left on a to-do list to get around to finishing at some point.

Gloom and I have been friends for many years now - so long that I can't actually remember when we first started making music together. The ancient archivists speak of an unreleased song we recorded together back in 2004, but I know this was not our first musical-rodeo and I feel like we'd collaborated on things a year or two prior to that. Even nowadays, living on opposite sides of the globe makes for an interesting challenge when it comes to the logistics of creating music together, and this was back in the days of dialup, and before smartphones. Over the years we've both moved countries, changed jobs, done-and-finished schools and all the other good stuff that invariably takes up more days of your week than you'd like. It feels weird to say this, considering we've released almost twenty singles the past few years, but our music hasn't always been popular and there was a time where day jobs and day to day living took up most of the time and energy either of us would have. There were times where we didn't chat much, let alone record music for months, sometimes years.

It was during one of these periods in 2022, that I'd dug up 'luv' from the archives and was polishing it. It had since gone though a bit of a facelift, with the familiar acoustic guitar being added a few years before. Our other music had started to build up a bit of traction and I was in a phase of messing with synths and electronic stuff, so spent a few days rewriting it once again. It was new and shiny again, but the vocals were the same recordings that Gloom had effortlessly conjured into existence fourteen years earlier. It had now been many years since our last release and I was floating the idea with her about finishing up a third song together to release. Unfortunately, being one of those real-life moments, there was no chance she could record anything new and no possibility of it happening any time soon.

I really wanted to get the song out there, as it always felt like the natural sequel to our first two releases and so I kept nagging, and though Gloom couldn't record anything new, she agreed to letting me release the song with the old recordings if I could make it work. I spent the next day or so covering them in more FX, adding fake harmonies via pitch shifting or doing my best falsetto impersonation of the Gloomster, and eventually we had something that was semi-decent (at least, compared to the quality of our releases back then). 'Luv' was ready... Almost. It needed a better name. The current one was ironically delicious, but it just didn't quite fit. Some brainstorming and many names later, we had 'Mania' - a story about love, life and restraining basements. It went up on our Spotify page and became a favourite of many of our listeners.

And that's the long way of saying that, yes, it may seem strange at first that we picked a 'recent' release to remaster for Halloween, but Mania really deserved the same fresh coat of paint that Blood and Bones and An Unhealthy Obsession received for Friday the 13th. It's a song from the same era that, until now, felt a bit held-together with old rope and duct-tape. As with our other remasters, we hope it struck a good balance between being faithful to a cult classic, and doing it justice.

You can listen to both the original and the remaster over at the usual places.

Do you have thoughts on which one is your favourite, questions on the production process? A favourite verse? Feel free to pop in a comment!