A Secret songwriting pages

Hi everyone! I HOPE YOU'RE ALL ENJOYING A SECRET! There's so much history in this song, I can't believe it's finally out!

I first wrote this song towards the end of 2022 - before letter to the stars was even released. Originally it was written as a piano ballad, until a few months later I wrote another piano ballad which sounded far better as a piano ballad (it's still yet to be released, but you guys have heard snippets of it..) I decided I would much prefer A Secret to be written in this soft synthpop style, and I made a project file with the chords and the drone fx sound, and.. left it. I had no idea what to do with it, so I moved on to write California, Welcome Back to Earth etc. instead.

Every now and then I would revisit the project file and conclude that I still felt just as lost in writing it as I did before, and again it would be closed and forgotten about. However, after I was done with Feeding Demons, and really around the same time as making Enter the Requiem, I decided to go back to it. It felt like a good time to look back on the song, and after focusing on some pretty heavy bassy music, I welcomed the opportunity to work on something much lighter and vocal-focused. I was also listening to a lot of synthpop (especially Magdalena Bay) and I wanted to try and lift some inspiration from their production style and inject it into A Secret. Maybe at some point I can make a production walkthrough so we can look at that more in depth.

The second image - the one with the lyrics written in coloured pen - is a really old page in my notebook. I'd scrawled the lyrics somewhere else (I actually have no idea where), but I felt really strongly about them and decided I wanted them written out nicely somewhere. Especially as at the time I didn't think I would be ever releasing the song. You'll see that I changed absolutely nothing about the lyrics between then and now: the entire song is exactly as it was originally written. And I think I wrote it in one sitting too. It really was just a stream of consciousness.

The other image is the spread of production notes I had going while working on the song. At the top of most of my spreads I'll have the key written down, which is really helpful when I'm writing harmonies. I also have a lot of notes about which takes I liked. This was especially useful in this song as I did more vocal takes that usual - there's a lot of stacking and harmonies in this song, and I'm bad at keeping track of takes unless I literally write it down. At the bottom of the page you see columns under 1, 2, 3, 4 etc, with numbers under those. Those are how I tracked which takes I liked. For example, for this attempt at line 1, I liked takes 2, 3, 5, and 7.

This page also has a lot of doodles on it, because I was desperately trying to come up with ideas for the artwork. Originally I had intended to entirely hand draw the cover art, but as the song was taking shape I kind of felt like that wasn't the best direction for this song. It felt too human a song to represent with a drawing. I knew I wanted pink to be the main colour theme, but that was about it. The final art sort of came about by accident, which is why none of the doodles here look like it at all.

My notebook is always a haven of ideas and notes as I'm working on my music. I love getting to share it with you guys because I'm sure most of it looks like nonsense to you, even though to me these pages were integral to how this song even came to be! I hope you're all loving it, and as always, thank you so much for your support <3