What started out as an experiment ended up as one of my favourite songs from the EP... One of those songs that you don't think is about anything, until it's finished. I really wanted to play with some vocal effects - I'd been listening to a lot of Bon Iver (that's probably fairly obvious) and originally I started playing a progression on the Baritone and singing nothing/nonsense over the top. Then I came across this word - petrichor - which seems to be a word made up by an Australian environmental agency but the definition they'd ascribed was "a pleasant smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather" and being that that smell is one of my favourite in the world I was struck by this idea to write a song about the most sensory things I could find.
Words like alpenglow and melliflous came courtesy of a Word of the Day app on my phone and it pushed me towards the smell/taste of the salt that comes off the ocean at the beach, which in turn took me towards the wave metaphor and the idea that if you keep on pushing forward and you've got good people in your life that, eventually, you will overcome.
The vocal effect was pretty simply created using a harmony engine. I recorded the harmonies individually at first but found that I liked the robotic sounding voice effects instead, which seems in direct opposition to the sensory nature of the lyrics... but that's how songwriting goes sometimes!
Words like alpenglow and melliflous came courtesy of a Word of the Day app on my phone and it pushed me towards the smell/taste of the salt that comes off the ocean at the beach, which in turn took me towards the wave metaphor and the idea that if you keep on pushing forward and you've got good people in your life that, eventually, you will overcome.
The vocal effect was pretty simply created using a harmony engine. I recorded the harmonies individually at first but found that I liked the robotic sounding voice effects instead, which seems in direct opposition to the sensory nature of the lyrics... but that's how songwriting goes sometimes!