00:13Hi, I'm Somber, and I'm gonna take you behind the song, Back to Friends.
00:17How can we go back to being friends when we just share?
00:25The song is about the struggle of having someone that you're intimate with,
00:34them being able to kind of move on with life and be in the same rooms as you,
00:40as if nothing ever happened, and how, for me, I can't really just act like that.
00:45I can't just move on.
00:47And I think it's a universal topic, but I think with the chorus,
00:50I found a unique way of saying it.
00:53So the first song I made that got me discovered was called Caroline.
00:57I made it back home in high school at my parents' house in my bedroom,
01:01and it was like one of my earlier songs I made on Logic.
01:04I wrote it and produced it myself.
01:06I posted it on the internet one night.
01:08It was like TikTok was very new, but it went viral overnight.
01:12I went to bed.
01:13Like I'm just a normal high school kid fucking off, you know, skateboarding.
01:17And I wake up the next day, it's viral.
01:19Literally the next day, every record label is in my inbox.
01:21Months prior to that, I would be making songs and emailing different independent record labels,
01:26like just sending files and like none of them responded.
01:30I told my dad and he was like, I don't believe you.
01:32And it was real.
01:33I got flown out to LA and I signed my first record deal.
01:36And then like for, you know, the next two and a half years, I was just grinding.
01:41I had a small, consistent audience, but nothing was, you know, doing enough to like recoup a record deal or make this career long term.
01:49So I kind of needed this and really grateful that it happened when it happened.
02:03Usually when someone writes a song, they'll go in with a melodic idea like chords on a guitar or they'll come up with a vocal melody.
02:10But when I start with a drum groove, I can set a vibe rather than set a chord progression or something.
02:16And like the drum groove will always make me feel a certain way and it helps me improvise more.
02:21So I started with this drum groove.
02:23It's programmed on addictive drums, which is a plugin that I love and I've been using for a long time.
02:32So I had this drum groove and I was just playing it on loop.
02:36And then I just heard piano bass notes.
02:39So this Yamaha upright right here, I just walked over to the piano and I played this.
02:51I just heard the that you hear in the intro.
03:01I always will like kind of set an environment by like layering oz or ooze over an instrumental before I lay down the lead vocals.
03:12So from there we have this.
03:16So this was next.
03:18And this really did it for me.
03:21Here I'll show you layer by layer.
03:36Hearing one of them alone sounds so shit.
03:38I put so little effort into the vocal performance on these.
03:40But then when they're all together they sound so great.
03:47I'd slap a little reverb on it, call it a day.
03:49Call it a day.
03:50And then from there I picked up my Gibson Les Paul.
03:54I tried like a bunch of things on the guitar and it wasn't working.
03:58So now I was like, what if I just played one, one chord over this whole verse and like literally one chord on repeat.
04:06And that was this.
04:07I mean how genius is that?
04:08But then when you bring it all together you have a vibe.
04:09Now listen to this.
04:13Something about everything else moving in the chord progression but then the guitar staying the same was really good.
04:21So from there the verse one lead vocal came in and that's actually, I recorded this in order so I did the verse and then the chorus and I was writing as I was going.
04:42So it started as mumbling but so we took out the piano bass notes and then it was just the guitar, the bass and the drums for the verse one.
04:51Here's that soloed.
05:01Touch my body tender.
05:07You can like literally hear me hitting the space bar in the delay.
05:10I kept that in.
05:17You can hear my, I always tap my feet to the tempo when I'm recording.
05:21Just the imperfections which I think make it the vocal even more raw.
05:25So what I put on this vocal was distortion and reverb and compression, stock compression, stock EQ.
05:35I like to put distortion on my verse vocal and then when my chorus vocal comes in have it be a whole chorus of non distorted vocals and I think it's like yin and yang in a way.
05:44Like the verse is like one voice and I think that the effect that the distortion gives is kind of like I want it to sound so emotional but the distortion is kind of like the vocals trying to cut through and escape almost.
05:54Because the non distorted vocal just doesn't give me that.
05:58I don't know how to further explain it but it just feels right to me.
06:02So that's what I do for a lot of my verses but then sometimes I think it could be like even more emotional just to have a vocal be raw.
06:09I actually wonder what this vocal sounds like raw.
06:17There's no soundproofing in this room.
06:18I love when my vocals just have the sound of the room.
06:22I hate soundproofing.
06:24So yeah, we're on the verse and then here comes the chorus.
06:27I find when I have an element that is active in the intro that I take out for the verse and then bring it back into the chorus.
06:46You have a huge lift and it's like you've heard it before but you didn't hear it in the previous section so you're kind of missing it.
06:52So once when the chorus came it was important to have a huge rise.
06:55So you'll notice I took out the ahs and I took out the piano bass notes and then when the chorus hits you get slapped with that again within the new chorus vocal which is kind of programmed differently.
07:05There's like six vocals for the lead vocal in the chorus.
07:10It just created this beautiful lift.
07:12Here let me show you these.
07:14So there's three of these.
07:18How can we go back to be friends when we just shared a bed?
07:22None of them are pan.
07:23They're all in the center, which I really like to do.
07:26And then.
07:27How can we go back to be friends when we just shared a bed?
07:36How can we go back to be friends when we just shared a bed?
07:55How can we go back to be friends when we just shared a bed?
08:00How can we go back to be friends when we just shared a bed?
08:07So verse two.
08:09We bring in a live drum kit.
08:11Let's play that.
08:12You were lifting on my chest.
08:20And then it's stacked with the drum loop that I programmed that you hear in the first verse.
08:25What I love to do is for the first verse in chorus, do a programmed drum loop that is not a real drum kit,
08:32which will usually be on addictive drums.
08:34I don't want to go back down for verse two.
08:36So my song keeps going somewhere.
08:38I'll bring in a live drum kit for verse two and the rest of the song.
08:42It makes the second verse feel like a new idea, which is great.
08:45And then we also brought in more guitars.
08:55And you'll see my swelling guitar is out now.
09:00I love taking shit out and bringing it back.
09:06Now it's back.
09:09The explosion.
09:10One of the most viral parts of the song is at the end of verse two,
09:14how the verse lifts into the chorus.
09:16I was scared to take a breath.
09:19Didn't want you to move your head.
09:22How can we go back to...
09:25I just want to show that solo because that's everyone's favorite part.
09:28The minute I write the first sentence, the rest of the song will come to me.
09:31I will mumble what syllables feel good to me over that.
09:35For this it was like...
09:38But then I figured out what words worked well with it.
09:41So it was touch my body tender.
09:43And I didn't have any idea what the song was going to be about.
09:46Because the feeling makes me weak.
09:48Okay.
09:49Kicking off the covers.
09:50I see the ceiling while you're looking down at me.
09:52When I wrote that verse, I was like, okay, this feels like it was about someone.
09:57It was no longer mine.
10:00What the instrumental felt like was the feeling of that intimacy.
10:04And that's kind of what the first verse is about.
10:06And then I wanted the chorus to be about, you know, it's no longer here.
10:10Like kind of asking the question of how are we acting like this never happened.
10:13My favorite part of this is hands down the background vocals I did.
10:24It's like church.
10:35Oh, I want to talk about this lift from the bridge into the last chorus.
10:40Let's solo these.
10:45This is where we kind of built an orchestra between my vocals and a bunch of Mellotrons, Udo, Basics, like more live piano.
10:56The fact that none of that is a real orchestra is insane.
11:06This was done with Benny Bach, who does a lot of synths and keyboards on my stuff and it makes a crazy mesh.
11:12It's so cool.
11:13I just loved the vibe that I created.
11:15So I was like, I want to just keep the vibe going and slowly fade it out.
11:19I feel like there's not enough fade outs in music now and I want to bring back fade outs.
11:25I just want to give the listener a second to think about what they just heard as it slowly fades out.
11:30Like the end of a movie.
11:32I love the details in this part.
11:35My favorite is what's happening in the keys during the fade out, which.
11:38It's like Twin Peaks.
11:43It's like Twin Peaks.
11:44It's so good.
11:50So I slept through the Grammy nomination live stream.
11:53So I woke up and everyone was just like texting me like congrats on the nomination.
11:59Like I knew that whatever I was in the running for best new artist.
12:03But like I still like in my mind couldn't believe that it could possibly in any world be me.
12:08When I wrote this song, which is one of the songs that got me there, I was not selling it.
12:13I was playing 200 cap clubs that weren't selling out.
12:15Like why am I why am I even expecting that to happen?
12:19But it happened and I'm so grateful and I can't I still can't believe it.
12:23And the biggest honor is like just being put in the same category as the artists that I'm being put in the category with.
12:30I admire them so much.
12:32You know, also all the other like just being Grammy nominated thinking of artists that have been Grammy nominated.
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