#pollyanner

(also on bandcamp & streaming services)

★ intro ★

Hey, it's mimi!! It's been two weeks since the release of my second album, Pollyanna. Thank you so much for the love; to all the people who've given me feedback on the album or have any thoughts on it at all... it's meant the world to even know ppl have given this thing the time of day.

I care about these songs on an abnormally large scale, as they've sort of soundtracked the last 2 years of my life, and I have so, so, so much to say about each and every song. There are so many details, pieces of writing, demos, and ideas that surround this album and go beyond a usual listen, and I felt like it would be very awesome to write about each one on an in-depth level.

i'll be showing demos, talking about my life, and am going from track 1 to 15 .... writing is hardddddddddddd. here's hypocrite!!

(polly looking at the 3ds that had just fallen out of the sky.)

★ hypocrite sessions (10/19/23-11/30/23) ★

Surprise surprise, this is the first song that I worked on after i finished 'open me' in 2023. As I was putting the final stretch of that album together around august-september of 2023, I kind of had an idea of where I wanted to go next. For LP2, I knew that I had three goals:

a. I wanted this album to be the 'light' to the darkness of open me. open me was an album designed to feel sort of like a descent into the ocean, and 'hues' was meant to feel like a sort of an escape from those dark depths, a glimpse of the light, so to speak.

b. I wanted to use this album to greatly expand my abilities as a producer. I was consistently finding myself making a lot of the same beats for years, and it didn't feel like the music that I wanted to make after a while. I was passing around the idea of LP2 being a 'sampler' of all the vibes and styles I could try out.

c. I very badly had been falling into the rungs of nostalgia for a lot of my childhood, rediscovering my old 3ds & plugging in my old consoles again, revisiting websites & videos i loved as a little kid, and reconnecting with my childhood just as I got close to graduation & officially became an adult. ironically, in the period of my life i had been the most scared about my future, I began to reminisce hard on my childhood. I wanted to make an album that utilized those polished to perfection aesthetics I loved (ex. nintendo menus, early 2010s vocaloid music, frutiger aero/metro graphic designs)

i think that third idea became something way bigger that encapsulated the actual story of the album, but for now, i'll just keep it short and say that alot of this album is about growing up & accepting/expressing every piece of yourself with total honesty, being unashamedly yourself. that's where 'hypocrite' comes in.

Despite what I had done on 'open me', after I had wrapped up 'hues', the last song on the album in october of 2023, I immediately felt extremely wrong. listening to the album back, it felt like the vision of it I had originally went in to achieve wasn't reciprocated in the sound of it all. I think I wanted to end on a note that felt more uncertain, but I put across the idea instead that things were definitively 'better', and 'ok'. I think even though I value that era of my life, I only had began to process the issues I wanted to say that I had defeated, and I felt like the entire album encapsulated a 'mask' of myself that I had fallen into time and time again. I had gotten so used to portraying versions of myself that felt wrong that I had made it almost impossible to be truly honest in my art. Every time I'd want to make something, the output wouldn't feel like it was authored by me, and for the first time, I wanted to take control and do that. (I wouldn't know the truth behind a good amount of this until a year after I started the song...)

I was browsing through splice for any source of inspiration and came across this gorgeous ass piano sample, so I threw it into FL, put some chorus on it, hit play, and began writing some ideas for lyrics.

At the time I started the song, I was considering starting therapy and had a lot of self-reflective thoughts on it. I realized that despite the fact that I seemed very loud about what I was going through when I made music, I could never really sit down and tell someone what the actual issues were. I was afraid of opening up to people, and it held me back from wanting to actually sit down and talk to a therapist. I wrote the first half of the song off of the idea that this fictionalized version of me (who became the very real representation of myself, 'Mimi') actually ends up having a session with her therapist, but always end up lying about details so that things seem better than they actually are. after all, it doesn't really matter what I would say, because they wouldn't know the real me hiding under all those lies.

I felt like a hypocritical person, someone hiding the true parts of themselves for the people around them (which you'll see is a running theme throughout these songs and stories), and in the end i was so repressed bcz of it all that i felt utterly clueless trying to start new songs.

After aboutttt a week, I came back around to it and it sounded something like this. This part didn't really necessarily change that much, lol!! I had no idea how to continue it though, so I shot over a demo desperately to VJ (neodigitalnative of Ultraviolet), and he threw together a reaaally rough but SICK idea of where I could take the song. He was in his DnB bag with his album 'Photon' at the time so he did something a little similar.

I expanded on the section, reordered things, threw together another verse reflecting & expanding on what I talked about earlier, and it was done at the time (even if I internally didn't feel totally satisfied with it... grrrrr...), with the song sorta chilling out originally into a nice, brisk beat. This version had some absolutely gorgeous layers though, i'll admit!! (thank u to the homies Tomie & Xander for help on this version back then <3 needed y'all's work to see the light of day)

OK. OK. lets faaaaaaaaaaaaaaast forward like about A YEAR into the future. it is officially now August of 2024. we had met one of the most important people in our life (ellie), who became the co-producer for the entire album, and after finding a group of people that felt like a family to me & finding A LOT of things out about ourselves (particularly, that we were a system..) I wanted to go about the intro to this album way differently.

.. this album in the span of about a year changed from a collection of songs, to a concept album embodying the 3 traits I wanted in Pollyanna. Another new idea in this change was the fact that we wanted to actually identify and process our emotions explicitly through pieces of ourselves w/o hurting eachother (like how open me turned out). I took a story that originally started in that album, and began to write a concept around these songs.

★ brief story explanation/character dump ★

BEFORE we get into this section, I should really talk about the two characters represented in this song: POLLY and MIMI.

unlike other people in these songs such as 'Rika' or 'Leanne' who are actively pieces of my life IRL in a plural sense, Polly and Mimi are characters explicitly designed as sonas for myself (Abby :3), made to represent 2 different sides of myself and my own struggles.

-Polly-

Polly the Bunny is a red haired bunnygirl mascot, made for the fictional online music store mp3eez.com in 2002. She spent a good half decade using her synthesized voice on hyper dance tunes made for ringtones, put out to rake in quick cash for the company. She became one of the most popular ringtone cartoons at the time, but unfortunately, mp3eez.com became a victim of itunes' reign, and shut down in 2006.

Polly is then sent to The Backend. The Backend is a house far off in the world, somewhere between the internet, and reality. it's a place where all things forgotten, either digital or real, go to exist. You could physically enter The Backend, but it'd be impossible to navigate if you weren't a resident. The house is nearly endless, rooms upon rooms of worlds that people left behind. It's nowhere near a ghost town, but it's home to many horrors and beauties alike. This world will continue on and be further explored in Cryptid Synapse, a long-term project me and my friend Lyra are starting soon.

Polly, being stuck in one room of the backend by herself, has a world to herself, a world where the only items are peculiarly a laptop, earbuds, a phone, and a bed. Over the course of 17 long years, she watched the internet grow and change before her very eyes, meeting new people through a computer screen as they came and went, knowing she'd never be able to meet them in person (being that she's an internet avatar given human life.. an anomaly, essentially.) she's a victim of the 'this person was last online 10 years ago' curse. She fears that due to being stuck in digital code, she'll never experience a lasting relationship with anyone online, despite her most important people being there. So what does she do?

She tries to become real.

After 10 years, Polly tries her best to find ways to live the life of a real girl, begging people to help her. Despite everything she tries, she's only seen as an anomaly, being coined the 'Pollyanna virus' by computer users around the world for her intrusive behavior.

Her story throughout this album eventually became a way of putting my online life into metaphor, and as Polly's life changed, mine did too. We met these online friends in person, and I found my family... but that's for another day. Anyways...

-Mimi-

Out of any character represented, Mimi is possibly the most honest character I've written... especially seeing as I embodied her with my (Abby) preferred alternate nickname.

Mimi was born an alien, forced to grow up in a human world without any knowledge of her roots, past or family. She grows up not wanting to be an alien, but not wanting to be human either. She doesn't want to conform, but she also doesn't want to be the person she was 'born as'. She has antennae! but she tends to cover them in public by pulling them to their sides, and covering them with hair while they are laid down, covered by heart shaped earmuffs that help her feel more comfortable. (this is an excuse she tends to use for why she has dog-shaped ear extensions on 24/7. she secretly enjoys it!)

Over the course of her life growing up, she encounters many pitfalls and meet a lot of people who hurt her, and her story in these songs is one of overcoming her trauma & morphing into who she wants to, deep down, be. A dog!

SO. in the story of Pollyanna, with nobody to understand Polly's plight for freedom from behind the screen, she gives up. Until one day, when a pink & yellow Nintendo 3DS arrives in the Backend, plummeting into her world from a giant colorful beam in the sky (that's the delivery system, it seems.)

Meanwhile, 4 months after coming out to her parents and opening up about her issues in 'open me', mimi (the dog) has that therapy session we wrote about earlier, questioning if it's even worth opening up to them about issues she's kept personal for so long. When she comes home, she spots her old 3DS glowing... as she peers into it, she meets Polly for the first time.

★ hypocrite sessions (8/19/24-11/21/24) ★

And so, after my summer trip to New Jersey, I met Elkie (elliestation, who co-produced this whole album with me, and is my sibling 4 life) & the entire course of this album (and our life) changed irreversibly (but i'll talk way more in-depth about all of the sappy stuff during another song, dw.)

One of the first songs we had ever revisited together with the new direction of the album in mind was Hypocrite. I was at the time listening to an absurd amount of Sonic Coaster Pop's 'SUPER MIRACLE CIRCUIT', an album full of fast paced songs that feel straight out of a Mario Kart Wii Wi-Fi connection screen (part of a really amazing early 2000's music scene that I WILL get back to), and I showed Elkie the intro track 'Spiral Neo Wave'. One of my main problems with the original hypocrite was how abruptly it began, and we had a vision to change that.

In the span of 2 days, me and Elkie then had a session that added an entirely new intro section to the song, which eventually evolved into "a world i'll never know". here's the original cut that they cooked up in that night!

the second part in the original version of 'hypocrite' that felt extremely off was the "IT DOESNT REALLY MATTER WHAT I SAY!!" part. I loved the vision, but I took VJ's stems he sent me and kind of messed it up in the final mixdown. When Elkie took it in, we workshopped a lot of ideas for the new, until they stripped it down heavily & filled what was missing with a fantastic guitar solo that assisted the strongest parts of VJ's pass. It's the best of both worlds!

I then provided lots of screaming and harmonizing... and this was the result.

FINALLY, the 3rd section of the song was entirely reworked by Elkie to match where the story went (and also because I just didn't like the original outro w/ the more ambient direction). Before I knew that this moment where Polly and Mimi met was going to be reworked for hypocrite, I originally wrote a small prose-y thing expressing the feelings I wanted in that moment one night. I wanted to explain that out of body feeling of seeing a different self for the first time. Maybe it's a younger piece of you that you missed for so long; or it could be a version of yourself that you want to be, but that feeling of witnessing yourself from the 3rd person is so potent, and I wanted that moment to feel that way.

"Ideal is a TV screen Myself ripped outside of me Stuck inside my escapism dream The plastic flowers around here help me feel complete I say these terribly outlandish things To explain feelings that I can't say It's too hard to just articulate (I know I'm wrong) But I feel like I'm a pipe dream  hypocrite, I'm stuck inside my body"

When I reused the 'hypocrite' motif of self-description, I did NOT initially intend it for the song, but I felt eventually that the feelings in this song tied really well to the sort of confused, repressed fog that the first half represented. The arc of the song now started so uncertain, and ended with hope, a glimmer of who you **could** be. Polly, in this circumstance, from Mimi's angle, feels like a superstar. The idol that she wants to be.

Initially, when I was pitching ideas to Elkie for the new section of the song, I was trying to figure out lyrics and ways to make the finale of hypocrite feel wayyyyyy more grand than it was. I didn't like how that original version just kind of fizzled out, I wanted make hypocrite build up to a cacophony of noise by the end of it's runtime, assaulting the listener with intense feeling that'll ride into the next song (which was always going to be Superpower). This was a really crappy voice memo I sent in the beginning... lol... but you get the point.

About a week later, me and Elkie got into a call to work on the section, and we wrote down actual lyrics for this part.

"forgive me for what i say i don't mean anything these lost abstractions i create melt away i know can help you through this pain but i'm scared i'll hear the words i'll say the answers right in front of my face i can't be replaced"

Elkie put down a version of themself singing these lyrics in the beginning of the new section, which we thought was so sick that we kept! Later on, they also did the spoken word for the section as well, which recited the earlier prose I wrote up.

When it came time to actually work on the session, we intended to work closely to the original vision, but I learned through this song the first of MANY lessons to come from Elkie: nothing needs to be accurate to the vision in your head. It's ok if a song turns out differently, sometimes you embark upon something WAY cooler if you just let the process do it's thing.

and that exact thing happened. in the span of around an hour, that ENTIRE final minute of the song was produced by Elkie. I'll always remember the call where they went dead silent, I was sending vocal layers I thought were cool, they were throwing stuff in, and that final section naturally built itself up within barely 55 minutes. That was genuinely one of the most magical musical moments of this album that I'll always remember, lol.

There's another cool thing about this section of the song, but I think I'll save that one for another song *wink* *wink*