DAY 1
ALMOST OVER
“Lying beside you feels right. It’s only for tonight.”
ALMOST OVER
The Concept.
Welcome to Day 1! Let’s get right into it; Almost Over is about dreaming. I’ve spent a lot of time with Neil Gaiman’s groundbreaking graphic novel The Sandman which is widely known as one of the greatest works of fiction inside or out of the medium of comics (it even finally got its own Netflix adaptation this year). When I was writing for our original demo that would become “Almost Over” (working title: “angryboi”), I started landing on a ton of imagery regarding dreams; never wanting to wake up, living inside a dream. The concept of dreams and their interpretations have no shortage of art dedicated to them, this was just my take on the matter. I’ll get into a little more about my process with songwriting below but a big theme on this album for me was taking my first instincts on what was on my heart at any given time and just running with them. I know the concept of dreaming as a whole may sound too shrouded in drastic metaphor on the surface, but dreams are really simple when you think about them. The dreams you dream at night are not that different to the concept of “living your dream” or “dreaming up new ideas”, all of those things are intertwined. So at its core, this song is about self realization. We all have dreams for ourselves. We have things that we want. Sometimes we go straight out and get them and other times, it’s not quite so simple. Every night, our minds remind us that those things are there and that they drive all of our actions in the waking world. This song is about looking at those things in the eye and deciding what’s important; chasing the dream or living it?
LYRICS
I swear that I can see your face and then; next thing I know it’s almost over now.
Am I reading in between all the lines? Or am I just believing the lies? truth may seem irrelevant.
prechorus: keep me close & I won’t hold you to anything. Let’s just have tonight.
I’ve been thinking it’s about time we let it out, let it out
our hearts pounding and breaking out, breaking out
Lying beside you feels right, ooooh it’s only for tonight.
I want, I want to know that I’ll never wake up and live in the dream within
So until we meet again:
I wanted to be the first of us to never wake up with something left unsaid - until we meet again??
I know you’d break all your rules for me but I’d never wake you early - is that unbelievable?
THE DEMO PROCESS
“I’ve been thinking it’s about time…”
— Almost Over
Our process for this record was really interesting. Phil was in a particularly creative mood this whole cycle, so we had tons of instrumentals that he’d written to work with. What eventually became “Almost Over” was one of my favorites. It all started as an instrumental entitled “Angryboi.”
In order to better understand our demos, you should know a few things! When I’m writing vocals, my first instinct is to form the melody. The way that I’ve gotten used to doing this is to record a demo with what I call “stream-of-consciousness lyrics". Silly name but what it means is that I kinda just sing whatever comes out of my head at the time and I’m mainly focusing on forming vowels that compliment the melody that I’m singing; so much so that sometimes the sentences don’t make any sense. The ultimate goal is to end up rewriting those lyrics cohesively later (when recording) but I’ve found this has really helped me come up with some of my better melodies. So enjoy hearing these original demos for what would become this first of two EP’s over the next 5 days, just remember there’s a method to the madness when you’re hearing demo lyrics that don’t make any sense!
-Josh Roa-Martinez- Vocals, Guitar, Programming
Here’s something really cool about “Almost Over” that I had forgotten about until preparing media for this album experience. I totally forgot that we had another draft of this song in its demo stage!
If you’ll notice in the main version of the song (at the top of this page and on Spotify, Apple Music, etc), something unique about it (for such a pop music oriented band), is that we only hit the chorus twice. That’s fairly uncommon for mainstream music (though not unheard of), so this draft features an extra chorus at the beginning which ultimately became the vocal chop hook in the final version. There’s also an early draft of the bridge that I’d totally forgotten about that then gets revisited after the last chorus. This is something we used in later arrangements but cool to see that we tried it here.
-Josh Roa-Martinez- Vocals, Guitar, Programming
Travis Time.
Something cool that I tried to do on this album cycle (as much as possible) is highlight our beloved Travis with some drum playthru videos. If you’ve ever been to see a live band, you know that the poor drummer is always obstructed by the rest of the band, so a few days this week, you’ll get to see Trav in all his glory. This first video of our new single “Almost Over” is an early release that you’re getting to see before it goes live, publicly.
If you enjoy it, be sure to email us and give some love for Travis. He works hard for this band and he’d be happy to hear some love and support from you <3
The Music Video
We went pretty simple with this video (to a degree), but it was a ton of fun to make. Ever since the last cycle, we’ve been trying to make our music videos ourselves. It takes a ton of planning and it was a lot of work to hone a completely new skillset, but we’re very proud of the things we’re now able to do completely in-house! Hope you enjoy this early look at the music video for “Almost Over.”