voiceunmuted

First Recordings: Picture Perfect pt.1 (Verse)

Added 2025-12-19 16:00:03 +0000 UTC

Most often these days, I only share one of the first recordings for each song. Typically because a lot of them remained pretty similar to the final product, so I just pick the one that's the most dissimilar so we can hear the progression of ideas. But this song. My goodness. I think I just had so many things I wanted to say, so much pent up frustration with the situation that led me to writing this, that it took me a few more iterations to get from the initial ideas to the more polished and thought-out lyrics.

This first verse is mostly the same, but with one small difference that really helped give me the leeway to find the right lyric and drive the song forward.

That one difference was just the last half a line here: "and my whole story". If I had kept that line, I truly don't know where I would have gone with the second half of this verse. It still says what I wanted the line to say. It needed to address how this person, and so many others in my life and streaming history, come up with a narrative for my life and who I am that they believe whole heartedly, but is not at all based in evidence or you know, reality. It needed to, in a single line, express the frustrations that I wrote a song and a half about ("The Girl", "bye :)").

Eventually, I decided to make a little bit more...passive aggressive, I suppose. So the line now is: "He believes he knows me and what I 'should' be". Which gives the same message, but in a better way, I think. It's not just "this person has created an idea of me in his head", it's that plus "this person believes that I, as a whole autonomous human being, am supposed to conform to that idea he has created."

That one small half of a line change not only improved its complexity and depth of meaning, but it also allowed me to later use the line: "He's already got his story" at the end of the verse to really pull the whole verse together! 🙌