If you’d asked me at the beginning of this year which music class was going to give me the most trouble, I would have pointed straight at EDM, without hesitation, which is funny, because I’ve listened to electronic music for years. Before COVID, I spent plenty of weekends in clubs up in Seattle, and in my younger years in the long-long ago days, at clubs in San Francisco, having the kind of wild nights that ended up on a random couch with few memories and no regrets. I’ve always liked music that makes people move and feel alive. For someone with synesthesia, electronic music can be a lot of fun. A good track doesn’t just sound good, also feels like motion. The body remembers what the mind lets go.
Despite all that, I spent the first two terms fighting the genre.
Part of the problem was that I approached EDM the same way I approach almost everything else: I wanted every song to carry a larger meaning. I wanted a story. I wanted a message. I wanted a reason for the song to exist beyond simply sounding good. The harder I pushed in that direction, the more difficult the process became.
At the beginning of the third term, I finally gave up arguing with the genre and started asking a different question: Why does EDM work when it works? I didn’t have time to keep up that fight. So here we go, down the rabbit hole. IRONICALLY, the reason for this is that I wanted to swing back around to a song I started the first term, Electric Heartbeat, which was an EDM song into which I tried to shoehorn some book stuff from a short story I have yet to finish.
I poured every second I could squeeze into my four songs this term. Figure skating stopped. Aviation stopped. Writing stopped. If it wasn’t music or family (and even family was negotiable for the first time in my daughter’s entire life), it wasn’t happening. Point blank, it wasn’t happening. I spent a lot of time reading, listening, and studying. What keeps people engaged? What makes one track feel flat while another makes you want to hit repeat? Why can some songs hold attention for four or five minutes with very few lyrics while others lose momentum halfway through? I spent less time on Sisters in the Sky (more on that later) because whether other people liked it wasn’t really the point.
But EDM was different. Since it wasn’t so deeply personal (or so I though), whether or not others liked it did matter.
The more I studied, the more I realized I had been trying to turn EDM into something else. When it started to become clear that Electric Heartbeat as it was wasn’t going to work without significant overhaul when I’m already so invested in that song as it is, I went full-blown fuck it! and decided to just let EDM be EDM, hello, new songs.
Oddly enough, that didn’t make the music less personal. Some of my own experiences are all over those songs. Burning Man found its way into them (“You can feel the rhythm in your body/Like the taste of molly”…IYKYK…IYKYK…). Years of dancing found their way into them. My unabashed and even proudly promiscuous past are in them (all of Delirium). The way I experience music found its way into them. The difference is that I stopped trying to explain those experiences and started letting them influence the music naturally.
The vocal side surprised me, too. While working on other projects this year, I spent a great deal of time trying to force a style that wasn’t really working with my operatic experience or current recording set-up. This last term, for EDM, I found myself leaning into a lighter vocal approach that fit both the music and my recording setup far better. Rather than fighting nonstop, I spent more time in head voice not worrying about the reverb that was sometimes picked up in my recording space. I was going to be adding delay and reverb and didn’t have to account for how “clean” recordings started. I let it be what it was.
Of course the result wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever is. What surprised me was how much fun I was having, and learning different techniques in Ableton (and Melodyne and iZotope plugins, but more on those in a different post).
Meanwhile, the class I expected to be my strongest became the one that kept me awake at night, literally all night, many nights. I spent more time working on a single sing for my audio recording class than I spent on all three EDM songs combined. Going into the year, I expected that effort to produce the opposite result.
What really caught me off guard happened when the songs left my computer and ended up in front of other people. I’ve never been particularly good at sharing my work. I’m still in line waiting to meet this mythical being called Confidence. Handing a song to a room full of classmates and waiting for a reaction ranks somewhere just below a root canal with anesthesia wearing off on my list of favorite experiences. And yes, that’s happened. I’m speaking from experience here.
By the time the final projects came around, I was convinced I had spent too much time on these songs to see them clearly. I had listened to them so many times that I no longer trusted my own judgment. Maybe they worked. Maybe they didn’t. I genuinely had no idea. My audio recording project wasn’t going well. I’d spent more time on that one song than I spent on all three EDM songs combined. Why would this be the thing that worked?
Then the music started. Within the first thirty seconds, the student sitting next to me leaned over and said, “This is pretty awesome.” My immediate reaction was something along the lines of…am I hallucinating?
As the song continued (despite doing three, we each had time to share one), I started noticing people moving with it, heads nodding, feet tapping, the sort of reaction you hope for when writing electronic music, but never really expect. I closed my eyes sure that it wasn’t going to end well.
Then it ended. The response was overwhelmingly positive. I wasn’t prepared for that. Total double-take moment, the instructor saying this is beyond what he’d expect for the class, students wanting to know when it’ll be available to stream, suggestions to make a video with the lyrics and sharing to YouTube… I wasn’t prepared for it.
Not after the amount of time I’d spent questioning every decision, not after spending months wondering whether I was completely missing the mark, not after convincing myself that EDM was probably going to be the class I struggled through, not after how audio recording went…
I sat there in a state of complete shock, and then I cried.
For the first time in a very long time, I felt like maybe I’d gotten something right.
After class, somebody asked when my other songs would be available. That was another moment that caught me completely off guard, not because I thought the song was bad. By that point, I knew I liked it. But liking your own work and hearing someone ask where they can listen to more of your work are two very different things.
I walked into that classroom half-certain I wouldn’t survive until the end. I walked out wondering if maybe there was actually a place for me in this after all.
Instead, EDM became the class I looked forward to. That’s the part I’m still trying to wrap my head around, that I started this year convinced electronic music would be the difficult class, and it ended up being my favorite and leaving me with something akin to hope for the future that I absolutely never expected. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.
Over the next week or two, I’ll probably write more about some of the things I learned while researching EDM and what I ended up applying to my own music. A few of those discoveries surprised me almost as much as the class itself did.
As for audio recording, that’s a different story entirely. I started the year expecting that class to be my strongest, the one that confirmed I belonged in music. Instead, it became one of the most difficult experiences I’ve had in four years of school and left me questioning whether I’m going to continue the degree at all.
It’s hard to fully enjoy a breakthrough when another part of your world is busy falling apart.
More on that in my next post.