"Dakara, Air Says Breathe"
Looks like 2014 is becoming the year of collaboration. I've been loving having a number of my friends reach out to me, to contribute vocals and lyrics to their songs. It's been a new challenge for someone like me who often likes to control both the words and music, to try attribute my own style and voice over someone else's song. In a way, I think it's made me a better songwriter - the constraints are sometimes freeing for my creativity. It gives me boundaries to work from.
When I was in Hawaii last December, my friend Scott Ohtoro played me some songs from his upcoming album. The songs were wonderful and catchy, but one stood out to me in particular, called "Dakara." It was an epic song full of orchestration, drum beats, a heavy bass, and chorus vocals. As soon as I heard it, I HAD to write for it.
I finally got the track and was ready to record my part...but got caught for a bit. I needed to write a part that did the song justice. It's not a stark track. There isn't a lot of space in it. It's chock full of instrumentation at most points, so the challenge was how to write a melody that didn't sit over the song and cause more chaos, but floated through it.
After some hemming and hawing on my part, I finally settled on an idea. It came to me one morning on my drive to work. I sat in my car in the parking lot singing the ideas into my phone, and i knew I landed on something when the melody kept going over and over in my head through the day.
You can hear the finished product below. I think it sounds pretty awesome and I hope you think so too.
You can also listen to more of Ohtoro's music here: https://soundcloud.com/scottohtoro Show him some love you guys...he worked his ass off on this album.