Hey Friend,
It’s Dave. Part 6 of Back to My Roots, finally.
Quick update on me first. Rough couple weeks honestly, I landed back in Riyadh from China and caught a nasty cold somewhere along the way, pretty sure Hong Kong. Fever, headache, zero energy for days. Mostly past it now.
Good news on the other end: the cover for Fun, song 3 on DREAMWRLD, is done and it’s dropping November 3rd.
Also got to do something this week I really liked. Called up one of our fans who’d bought a CD a while back and we just talked for a bit, actual phone call. Hearing someone’s voice instead of a DM hits different. If you want that too, text me your number and I’ll call you. Not a bit, I mean it. By the way, the cover for ‘Fun’ is below.
Anyway. Part 6 of Back to My Roots. (If you missed 1 through 5, they’re all up on the journal page, go check em out.)
The first song
Do You Think of Me started way before any of this, back in 2017 or 2018 when I was still in a pop punk band. I wrote it on guitar. Different lyrics, different hook, it even had this EDM style post chorus thing happening at one point.
By the time Hunter and I picked it back up we tore basically the whole thing down and kept just the idea.
We were literally so green when it came to writing and producing songs. Didn’t have a clue what we were doing. Took us a good month or two just to produce it, cut the vocals, find the right sound. Hunter ran through four or five different versions trying to make the electronic pop direction work, and it just wasn’t landing.
So we got into it a little, honestly. I told him this isn’t working, we need something different. He grabs the guitar, starts messing around, plays this offbeat little lick almost by accident, and I go wait, that, right there, loop that.
That’s the exact loop on the record. The whole song pivoted off an argument and one guitar lick.
The shoot
Once the song was done, my friend Mo drove up to Jersey and we did our first ever shoot at a park near Hunter’s place. Neither of us had a clue what we were doing, style wise or content wise. We just showed up 😅.
A few days later, December 27th, two days after Christmas, we’re in Times Square filming ourselves on an iPhone singing along to the song. It was freezing, fingers going numb freezing. Had to duck into a 7-Eleven every 10 or 15 minutes just to warm up before going back out to shoot more.
Telling people
We told our friend Jess first, she’s a songwriter from Staten Island too. Told her the band was called No Fltr now. She just went, “not bad, it’s better than Say Cheese. anything is better than Say Cheese.” 😂 Fair.
Wild how different it used to sound compared to what you know now.
Thank you for reading all the way thru, seriously.
Dave
