JULY 2018
NOTICE: Original Music and all rights to it by Mikky Ekko. This is a personal project for no commercial gain.
I'm way off my schedule, there should have been 4 hijacks (one a month) since the last one, but there was a bit of a hijack holdup (see what I did there?). Life stuff got in the way...i.e. return from travels, the beast from the east, quitting jobs, new jobs, sports injuries, broken routines, writers block...the list goes on. It's still just a list of excuses so I'm trying to return to it.
A positive effect of starting The Beat Hijack is that I have actually started writing more as a consequence. Despite the lack of hijacks, I've actually been writing non-hijack stuff.
I always intended this month's hijack to be the third. However, after the first two, I got a few suggested songs which I tried to write for and I struggled with them and got sidetracked. I've learned from writing this month's hijack that I definitely need to extract/construct the beat from the original ASAP as it helps to be able to write without the original lyrics clouding my process. Incidentally, finding an instrumental of this song was impossible, however I found an online tool which uses AI to separate the audio from the vocals, its pretty amazing even though the sound quality isn't perfect.
I first heard "Who are you really?" by Mikky Ekko years ago when I used to watch the TV show, True Blood, it was playing in the background of one of the scenes where I quickly Shazamed it. I've loved the song ever since, with frequent plays on my playlists.
I like the rolling gait of the song with the bassline and the drums. He also does some nice lyrical repetition, particularly in the bridge of the song "We are the fire, we see how they run, see how they run. Lift me higher, let me look at the sun, look at the sun..." etc. That bit is one of my favourite parts of the song, especially in the 2nd verse where that guitar riff comes in underneath it. I tried to keep some of that repetitive roll in the latter half of my verse using the repetitive rhyme pattern to the first line of that section i.e. "I am the fire...etc"
Writing for this hijack was both easy and hard. The title generated an introspective theme for me. I came up with lots of thematic ideas really quickly. I even thought of straying away from the 1 verse rule and coming up with 2 verses. One verse would be a negative reflection of myself, the 2nd would be a positive. I got some ideas for each verse but could never quite flesh out a full verse for each section. Then I got distracted by the idea that every version of me that others see is completely different from the next so what does that really mean for one's self-perception. So then I started thinking about the theme, less about myself, but about the various roles and personas that we all inhabit all of the time but I couldn't find a way to connect all of those things, plus I kept being pulled back to the 1st version.
In the end, I think it ended up being self-reflective, marrying up the two sides I wanted to represent into one verse. It was hard because its quite honest, as much as I could be given a verse.
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