Make Me Feel Alright
Album • March 16, 2024
My first album. Late-night self-therapy turned into spacey, honest songs.
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Story
This whole music thing kind of came together by accident. I had a couple songs already lying around – Liftoff and Lucky Break started as instrumentals I just put up onto YouTube for fun. At some point I thought, “why not throw some lyrics over these?” and that was basically the spark. From there, whenever I felt like crap, usually late at night, I just opened up Logic and spit out whatever was in my head. At the time, I was in a pretty weird spot in life: stuck in the last part of school, just had to repeat a year, didn’t know that many people in my new class. Music ended up being where I poured all of that.
Writing & Themes
The songs are all super personal, even if they don’t always sound that way. Liftoff is kinda leaning on the story of Romeo and Juliet. Make Me Feel Alright was about my ex, Ocean, well I think that one's obvious, and Lucky Break was trying to process a kind of imposter feeling I sometimes struggled with. There wasn’t a grand plan or a concept, it was just me making songs whenever I felt like I had to, and then realizing at some point that they actually worked together as an album.
Production
I made everything in Logic, mostly finding an interesting loop and building something around that. I leaned hard on reverb and arpeggiators, which gave the whole project this space-y, 80s kind of vibe. Around then, I was listening to a lot of Grimes, and while I wasn’t copying her, the way she used arps definitely lined up with what I was doing. Honestly, using arps just made it easier to build melodies that felt alive. The sound is definitely rough around the edges sometimes, but I think that’s also what gives it character.
Looking Back
For me, Make Me Feel Alright is the perfect snapshot of that period. It’s raw, a bit messy, emotional, but it’s real. If there’s one thing I’d change though, it would be the mix and mastering. Back then, I just threw Logic’s built-in mastering assistant on everything and called it a day. But even with the roughness, I think it holds up. Liftoff especially still feels like such a strong opener that I’ve even thought about doing something more with it. As a first album, it couldn’t have been a better starting point: maybe a bit unpolished, but honest, and definitely the beginning of everything I’ve built since.
