'I Felt Free' Original Colin Demo (2009)

WARNING : I GIVE SOME INSIGHT TO THE SONG'S MEANING HERE, DON'T READ IF YOU PREFER TO KEEP THINGS MYSTERIOUS :)

Greetings friends,

I thought this would be a neat little thing to share with you all...

In April of 2009 we were a little over a year into the writing process for 'Blue Sky Noise'.  I was living in a weird ass apartment above a bar on Main Street in Doylestown at the time. 

I'd often be recording song ideas deep into the night and would take a smoke break around 2am to stare down into the alley below my studio window.  Everyone would drunkenly spill back out into the world and there would be people fighting, yelling, making out, running from the police, and other forms of typical debauchery.  While watching all of this unfold  I would attempt to collect my thoughts and feelings about whatever tune I was tinkering with in between pulls on an American Spirit or Nat Sherman (I've been offically smoke free for 6 years now but damn sometimes I miss it).

Anyway, the night that I wrote this song I was a few drinks in myself and remembered thinking "I hope that one day some of the people in this alley will be singing the words to this."  I also remember thinking directly afterwards in a completely different voice  "no one will ever be singing this you fool because this song is not good and the Circa dudes will never want to work on it"!

BSN was the first album that any of us besides Anthony actively contributed vocal & lyric ideas on a regular basis.  He had requested this of us, otherwise I'm not sure I would have even had the courage to submit the idea to the band.  

Even musically It's a distinctly un-circa sounding demo by design...  This was because it came to me as a fully formed vocal & lyric melody in my head and I just wanted to create a really simple scaffolding for them to live on.  This idea came out like vomit, I think from start of the idea to having this demo done it was like 3 hours.  Probably the fastest I'd ever written something before.   I didn't feel the need to try and circa-fy the music myself, if the idea was strong enough, the dudes would say so and we would work on it together.  And to my surprise they all really dug it.  Before we would record the final version with Botrill in Toronto later that year we probably redemo'd it ourselves 3 more times. I'll try to find those versions at some point too but this is the initial seedling if you will....

While in the studio we all decided the song really needed a bridge, I had a cool chord movement ready to go and so late one night in our rented house in Toronto, Anthony and I wrote the "I will learn to live..." section together in just a few minutes.  It was a very exciting feeling and I remember barely sleeping because I couldn't wait to try it out with the whole band the next day.  But back to this original version...

Sonically I think I was drawing inspo from the song 'Pets' by Porno For Pyros and the song 'Maps' by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  To me this is quite obvious but maybe not so much to others.  

I wouldn't release my first solo album as Psychic Babble for another 2 years after this and even though I had already written a handful of other songs with vocals, I was just starting to get comfortable with my own singing voice and vocal range. This is obvious too hahaha! As you will hear it's a very rough performance but there is something charming about it nonetheless and feeling the enthusiasm from the band to work on this, having it make the album and eventually become a song that people sing the shit out of live stands out in my mind as one of the strongest confidence-building journeys of my artistic life. 

The theme of this song is the universal experience of overcoming heartbreak... while I think it is broad and can apply to almost any scenario of grief you wish to apply it too It was inspired by a difficult but liberating breakup that I went through.

The person on the other side of this breakup (with whom I actually remain great friends with to this day) shared a really beautiful sentiment/story with me before we split.  She had been traveling and was talking to someone she met in her travels about our relationship and had sort of admitted that she was lying about some things and not being truthful with me.  

The person said to her "you should tell him the truth, no matter how painful the truth is, when you tell someone the truth in a situation like this you give them the gift of choice and freedom.  They get the freedom to choose whether to stay or go.  If you never tell them the truth, they are just a prisoner of your lies." 

And so when she returned from her travels she not only told me this story but she also told me the truth, something very admirable and even something I admittedly hadn't been able to totally do for her either.  She told me the truth and in that moment, I felt free.  

There it is...  I hope that this doesn't ruin the song for you.  I totally want everyone to keep their own version of what the song means, this is just simply what it means to me.  

I'm deeply grateful for the opportunity to share with you like this.  It feels fucking sacred.  You all blow my mind and melt my heart and I just want to do right by the bond that we share. I hope you enjoy this demo and I hope you all are staying safe. We will have some more cool shit for you next week. 

xoxo

Colin

ps. for those of you in levels 3 and 4, each time a file gets put up here like this it will also get added to the digital archive if it isn't already there.  cheers <3