unvoiced lyrics: Restless
This is the second outcome of my self-appointed creative residency of unvoiced lyrics, where I share my lyric-poems and their stories, as well as explore my creative processes.
2021 still feels like pandemic era, was it? I remember spending the first half of the year still in auto imposed social distancing, as Mexico wasn’t really enforcing the stay at home mandate. It was also the year we decided to launch our music label. We had been releasing beats on Youtube and selling licenses, so distribution and artist development just made sense and our creative growth seemed to demand it. In this spirit, I decided to take an online essentials course, from which I took some valuable basis for understanding the few straight forward concepts the music industry handles cleanly and is transparent about, as well as a distance education experience that helped me get through the course faster than I would have on my own time, by making it more interesting. Because I enjoyed group interactions and discussions, even though I haven’t always been such a big fan of class participation, at some point in high school I found out I was full of opinions and that I had plenty of arguments. So, being that type of a student I liked presenting activities via zoom and talking about my ideas during weekly meetings. The course assignments were actually not that bad, we explored many aspects of creative work, and this is how Restless first came to be, although much wordier, half in English half in Spanish and melody less.
The assignment was to write a song telling your life story or something like that, a hard enough challenge that about half the group was still working on it at the due meeting, and I presented mine just like that, called it a melody-less song, and put it on a flyer to submit. I did put effort into it though. To write it, I looked back into what identifies me. I feel like a big part of who I am revolves around the fact that my family is multicultural, traveling, and learning languages were a big part of my childhood and early teenage years. So I wanted to express the idea of walking slowly but restlessly, exploring, silently observing, trying to fit in without attracting attention to oneself. A behavior that has taken me years to recognize, and that I have had to break through in order to build meaningful friendships, which I still have a hard time keeping. This is comprised in the first verse, chorus, and bridge.
In the second part of the lyrics, second verse and chorus, I wanted to express another sort of restless feeling, a much faster paced one but also less lonesome. A state I’ve increasingly found myself in while trying to find my place in the world, a path I know is shared by many, but that I have also had the luck to share with someone I get to build my life with, which is a big part of who I am now as well. The last bit is about the discomfort of the unknown future and unexplored paths, expressed through the awkwardness of walking in a crowd, everyone on their way, some are crossing, some carelessly bumping into you, others pass you from behind, there’s no time for sorry because everyone is apparently going somewhere.
This whole thing didn’t occur to me all at once either, it came in segments. And it took some time for me to start writing, it also took some reference research, fortunately I have plenty. I’ve always been a reader of the most varied kinds of books. And I have a personal collection of graphics books—most are children’s but not all of them—that has been fed by many members of my family throughout the years, because they know I love graphics, and simply narrated stories. So I thought back to two very meaningful pieces, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and Dr. Seuss’ Oh the places you’ll go! Both of which are inspirational in their own way, but to me they share a feeling of nostalgia contrasted with one of longing for something yet to come, at least that’s the meaning I attach to them.
I passed the course when I finished every module, got a certificate, and life kept going. However, in the next months I kept revisiting the poem, trying, in the only way I know, to make a melody for it: in my head, changing its form, inverting, adjusting, tweaking here and there. And life kept going.
Then, about a year later, on Feb 22nd 2022—we had moved out of Mexico City into my mom’s uninhabited house, in what I’m just going to describe as Mexican countryside near a small town in the state of Morelos—we were celebrating my birthday, just my life partner and I, with a couple of beers, watching freestyle battles and pretending I could rap as good as him, and we decided to make a beat. So suddenly it was up to me to create the first draft, I felt this to be a responsibility too heavy to bear, but went through with it. Of course, after I felt I was done, he made my musical Frankenstein monster sound like music, putting it into place. Then out of nowhere I was also selected as the main vocal recorder, yet another loose shoe…but I went with it and just like that, with a somewhat awkward five seconds of clean in tune singing then breaking down into laughter, the Restless’ melody came to reality. So, these are actually not entirely voiceless lyrics. The truth is even though I did record it later that year, my vocal performance is far from my desired outcome, rendering them improperly voiced.
As for the beat we made that night, that became Restless’ original instrumental, we named it Monte Paoz (Mount Paoz) because, we’ve been unironically generationally hacked by Dragon Ball, a fact that only embarrasses me mildly. Either way, Restless is composed on top of this beat, and I feel like it sits on it by having a slow step-by-step sort of vocal rhythm, it’s actually a very simple melody that goes up and back down, in a continuous motion. The verses and choruses share the same melodic structure, and were “fitted” to the beat on the night we made it, yet what I would call the bridge, right after the first chorus, was left unsung for a really long time until my partner helped me develop the melody on that part, so I adapted the transition towards the second verse on what he proposed, adjusting one last time the lyrics. Getting the final result:
And I just wonder
Of all the places
we could go
I’m a restless
strutter
never stutter
Sell you
breezy lies
like Yves Klein
All as I wonder
‘bout the
And I just wonder
Now, ever since I decided to start this column I’ve been trying to figure out the possible new outcomes I could make to present this song-poem. This time I decided to try using a different approach from last time. Because, I think making organic sounding musical elements digitally is still a challenge, not only for “vibe producers” (for lack of a better term), but in general for music producers. That said, I’m not ready to make a decent demo, and AI is off the table for this one, even at demo stage, so I went with a simple visual form, a triptych design, narrating the three verses and choruses, presenting the lyrics in a comic style to express the continuous motion of the song. Like the poem, the visual is also inspired by different artists. I got the idea to make a simple line art zine, with writing on it, not only from Persepolis’ graphic novel design, but also from two distinct artistic influences, Basquiat, whose Early Moses painting particularly inspired the feet sequence and his straightforward form the general style of the vignettes, and Bhajju Shyam’s The London Jungle Book, whose story and work were also of huge help in abstracting concepts.