Episode 26 - 'Dancing With Our Demons'
We’re baaaack! Last episode I mentioned that I would be taking a little break as I moved to a new apartment and got my studio set back up. I was imagining that it would be maybe the months of June and July of 2022. But life found a way to keep us apart. But in July 2023, I recorded this episode and it took me until today to release it. So I’ve been sitting with this episode’s song for months and I’ve been SO READY to get back on the BS Train.
In this episode, I was inspired by the work of Artist/Author Yumi Sakugawa. Specifically a particular passage from the book Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe, in the section titled, "We are not just Light, We are not just Darkness, We are Everything":
'So let us get to know our darkness, our demons that exist in the dark shadows of our minds, the aspects of ourselves we feel most ashamed of.
Invite your demon for a slice of cake and a cup of tea.
It might feel awkward and uncomfortable at first.
Allow the demon to say what it feels like saying, feel what it feels like feeling, think what it feels like thinking.
Simply observe and listen with a gentle intention to understand where your demon is coming from.
Let the demon say what it wants to say…and then ask your demon to come back another time for more cake and tea.
Schedule regular tea and cake dates with your demons
Sometimes your demon will give you something in return for your understanding and kindness, something you can only receive for having the courage to face your darkness. A jewel, a beautiful idea, a key to a secret place…
And after a while you may realize that for this whole time your demon was afraid of you and was waiting for you this entire time
For your love, compassion, and time.
Your assignment from the Universe:
Prepare different cake and tea combinations for your different demons.
Once you have gotten to know a good majority of your demons, organize a Dance Party.'
Episode Transcript
You're listening to 50 Bad Songs, a behind the scenes look at the process of transforming ideas and experiences into music and lyrics. Also known as song writing! Each episode, you will hear a new song and how it came into existence. My name is Tim Rosko, and this is season three, episode 26, "Dancing With Our Demons".
Hello BSers we're back. Last episode. I mentioned that I would be taking a little break as I moved to a new apartment and got my studio all set back up. I was imagining that would be maybe like the months of June and July. Last year. And I was, uh, fully ready to start making episodes again. But then I had an unexpected job opportunity come up right at the end of July.
And well, now it's been a full year, so I've been sitting with this episode's song for months and I've been so ready to get back on the Bad Songs train. In the last episode, I mentioned that I wanted to approach this podcast and the songs differently with a focus more on "I am a songwriter, and this is a podcast about that." The song that you were about to hear is one that I co-wrote with another songwriter, separate from the podcast. And most of the remaining songs for this season fit that bill as well. So I'm excited for you to hear all these songs and stories.
In other news, uh, the new apartment is great. I've been here a year, so. It's great. We love it. There's so much more light, which has done wonders for my mood and productivity. Uh, like I said, it's been a very busy year, but overall it's been a really good period for me and I hope it has been good for you as well.
If you are new to the show. Welcome as always, this is a fantastic episode to start with and we are happy to have you here. If you don't already know, this podcast is a documentation of a long growth process over time. And if you'd like to hear that growth from the beginning, we have a backlog of episodes that will take you on that journey from the very beginning. We've grown so much and come so far in the four years since we started.
Or if you don't have that much time on your hands, you can just listen to each of the songs that we've written on each episode by visiting 50badsongs.bandcamp.com or streaming them on Spotify and Apple Music. If you are a longtime listener and have enjoyed listening to 50 Bad Songs. I encourage you to consider supporting the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/50badsongs
We've got bonus content for you over there. And if I have my ducks in a row, you might just get early access to episodes. What does early even mean anymore? Who knows? Special thanks this month to our esteemed Patreon patrons in the Tenor Section tier. Susan and Chris Rosko, Francesca Scalici Rebecca Murphy, Vicky Scott, and Shirley Park.
Your support truly means the world to me. And I believe Patreon is changing their format structure. So we might have an option to create. For you to follow and support on Patrion without a monthly subscription. We'll talk about that in the future. Anyways. Thank you for being here today. And once again, here is a brand new song "Dancing With Our Demons".
[“Dancing With Our Demons” by Tim Rosko plays]
So to start, I received as a gift a book by the author / artist, Yumi Sakugawa called Your Illustrated Guide To Becoming One With The Universe. Yumi makes this really interesting and lovely art and then writes really powerful and inspiring things. you should definitely go check out their art on Instagram. I will link it in the social media posts and transcript after the fact.
But this book was given to me as a gift in 2020 for my friend, Heather, and was my first introduction to Yumi's work. Obviously you can tell just by the title alone, that this book has a lot of big ideas. And we are clearly already in the existential realm of ideas. Um, in particular, this song was inspired by a section that comes about halfway through the book.
Uh, I'm going to read the section now to give you the full context. Don't worry. It's not very long. , So it comes after a page titled we are not just light. We are not just darkness. We are everything. And it follows. So let us get to know our darkness, our demons that exist in the dark shadows of our minds, the aspects of ourselves, we feel most ashamed of.
Invite your demon for a slice of cake and a cup of tea. It might feel awkward and uncomfortable at first. Allow the demon to say what it feels like saying feel what it feels like feeling. Think what it feels like thinking. Simply observe and listen with a gentle intention to understand where your demon is coming from.
Let the demon say what it wants to say. And then ask your demon to come back another time for more cake and tea. Schedule regular tea and cake dates with your demons. Sometimes your demon will give you something in return for your understanding and kindness. Something you can only receive for having the courage to face your darkness.
A jewel, a beautiful idea. A key to a secret place. And after a while, you may realize that for this whole time, your demon was afraid of you and was waiting for you this entire time. For your love, compassion and time.
Your assignment from the universe. Prepare different cake and tea combinations for your different demons. Once you've gotten to know a good majority of your demons organize a dance party.
This whole book really touched me, but that section stuck with me and swirled around my brain for a long time, until I came up with some. Initial lyrics that I wrote in my notes app on my phone, around the end of December 2020 goodness, 2020. , the initial idea.
In my notes does not have a particularly great flow per se, but the idea was there. And specifically the chorus idea of shake, shake, shake, jumping scream. Um, is there. And has been there from the beginning. I just wanted to get the idea down to explore it more later. After the fact. So my original note in my phone read.
We've had our cake and we've talked about our feelings. We let it all hang out. And we took the bait and we let it get the better of us. But now, without a doubt, we're going to shake, shake, shake, jumping, and screaming, get wild and start moving without a reason. And going to break, break, break. Our hearts are beating. You're not dreaming. You're just dancing with your demons.
And I imagine this song, like somewhere in between Taylor Swift's shake it off. And Billy Idol's dancing with myself. I wanted it to be sort of an upbeat pop rock type song. And. So that's what we set out to do.
So in the summer of 2021. I decided that I wanted to do more songwriting and co-writing with people separate from this podcast. As in writing songs with the deliberate intention that they exist as songs for either myself as an artist or someone else. As in like, not just a writing exercise or a goofy song that I have no vested interest in.
, this was a difficult and scary thing to say out loud and to commit to it's so much easier to give yourself permission to write. When you say it's an exercise or when you are not trying to make a statement as an artist.
And I was intentionally doing that with this show because I knew that the baggage and fear that comes with that kind of like artistic commitment could derail me for a long time. And the whole purpose of this show. I was to avoid derailment and write a lot of songs. Worrying about figuring out who I am as an artist could get in the way of like actually practicing doing the thing.
And so. That's why we, we did that for the first half. Uh, but in 2021, I decided that at this point I had proven to myself that I could write a song. So I wanted to start exploring what it might look like. If I tried to write a song for me as an artist, What would that look like? What would that sound like?
, and just to be clear here, like I've been writing ideas in my notes app for years, like lyric ideas come to me all the time. , And I fleshed out several of them into full song lyrics, but honestly, I was still scared to write in this sort of like personal capacity. , you know,
I was scared to say what I wanted to say and have people hear it. So my roommate, Colby, who you heard , on this podcast in episode 13, introduced me to some of the people she has co-written with. And one of those people was a Eitan Snyder. Eitan is a wonderfully talented songwriter and a great person. And in a bit of cosmic comedic timing that we both found funny.
Um, he had just moved from LA to Nashville around the same time that I moved from Nashville to LA. So he, and I set up a session together over zoom because we're on opposite sides of the country. And I told him about what kind of music and styles were inspiring to me at the time. And I pulled up this note from several months prior and together, we began to write. As I mentioned, the original idea in the notes app did not have the best flow, but it did have a lot of the main ideas. And luckily, Eitan agreed to work on this idea with me. And so we started collaborating to make the lyrics work better.
This particular lyric writing experience was interesting because I had a very clear idea from the book and I wanted it to capture that energy and ideas, but I didn't want to steal the words from the book. But I also wanted it to still work with the original concept, you know?
So like how could we take those ideas? And turn them into lyrics that made sense in a song.
I insisted that we keep the tea and cake imagery. Even though this seemed kind of random to Eitan, but I really wanted to keep it in. I think it was Eitan who had the idea that you hear in this original work tape of the song. That is more focused on the cake being something that was like indulgent and running out.
Making mistakes and being afraid to trust. , Written in this way, the lyrics made sense in context with each other, but weren't exactly the idea I was going for. AKA. Pulling from the book.
But in the moment of the writing session, I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted them to be. So I went along with it for the time being more on that later. As for the chords. I don't remember who came up with what? And at this point it's irrelevant.
I know that I had talked about wanting it to be more of an upbeat pop rock song. Cause I'd had that idea from the very beginning. , so we had guitars and synths in mind. Even though we were both working on pianos, but you can easily hear how the chords we came up with. Could be power chords that are played by a guitar, which they are in the final version.
As mentioned the chorus was basically already written in the original note app idea. We did rearrange some of the lines for a better flow. So we took off the ING's from jumping and screaming. , and basically that was that because. The chorus was pretty much already set lyrically. So I think that
It was the first thing that we worked on musically. So this is where the power chords came from. When I originally wrote this note. I had already heard a sort of jump, jump, jump vibe. For the melody. And that was our. Jumping off point. So we landed on a pretty straightforward chord progression, one minor six minor, two major four major five.
It's a very common pop. Uh, chord progression.
And, We mirrored the melody of. Dance. And with our demons doing that little dip below the tonic, and then back up, we mirrored that in the instrumental hook that comes after the chorus. I'm actually unsure whether we came up with the melody first and that informed the hook. Or if it was the other way around, but either way, those two elements are connected and became the musical linchpin for the song.
we also decided that we wanted to keep the chorus in first person, plural, AKA. We are realm instead of switching to you and you're just dancing with your demons. And I definitely think that was the correct choice. It made it feel more like the song you could sing along with and dance to. And I wanted to write a song that made listeners feel connected in this way.
So my original notes app idea did not have a second verse. So we had to come up with one from scratch. , it's been so long at this point. I honestly can't remember who wrote what I asked Eitan, if there was anything he remembered about writing the song and he had this to say, "I definitely remember liking the idea that it was about learning to live with your demons instead of fighting them. That feels like a unique twist to the normal discourse around demons and music. And I still really like that". So essentially. We were going with the idea from Yumi that you are sitting with your demons and hearing them out, listening to what they have to say.
So in the second verse, we say, pull up a chair and look them right in the eye. You are not shying away or backing down. In the session and in the work tape, the next line was say with your stare, that it will be all right. , I didn't feel that this line was right just yet in my mind, but again, we wrote it down for the time being and moved on.
For the second half of this verse, we started diving more into the imagery of dancing, you know, get out on the dance floor. Which is not only thematically appropriate, but also great for an upbeat song, as it's encouraging the listener to dance along to the song. And, you know, that's ultimately what we want the audience to do.
And then of course the encouraging reassuring lyrics of you're not alone. And I won't let you be afraid anymore because I am still me. Even if I'm writing a song with demons in the name, it's still about encouragement and self-empowerment, I don't know. , but also by coming back to this sort of dance hall imagery,
We set ourselves up to go right back into the chorus, which is all about dancing and shaking and jumping and fun.
So as we know if you've been listening to this podcast, , the bridge is an opportunity to make the music sound a little different and to include new lyrical ideas, or maybe a contrasting thought.
I want to say that the first line we had was we're less scared of them than they are of us. Again, trying to reiterate that our demons. Are not as scary as we make them out to be. And that they're just a part of us that wants to be seen and loved. I think a Eitan really liked the word guts to rhyme with us. So we came up with the other line about hating our guts.
I remember I was talking about how this could be generalized to mean something like dancing with our demons is something that makes other people hate our guts. Because it's not what we are told to do.
After some time though, I felt that this line made it sound like we were making our demons hate our guts, which is kind of the opposite. To the original ideas. So I went back and changed it to it's this kind of thing that takes all of our guts. As a more empowering idea and focusing it back on the fear we feel and how that is not necessary anymore.
In the session, we also only had the two lines and had the idea of a melodic interlude. Between each we toyed around with another line. As you hear in the final song. But we never settled on it in the session. After the sessions though, we landed on the second line saying something like we dance and we sing when the going gets tough, but we went back and forth on whether it should be dance or shake or jump or sing, uh, or, or scream. Dancing and singing felt the most natural to me. And they were. I guess the least. Used words. So that's what we landed on., After the bridge, we had this idea for a quote. Down chorus. Or a chorus that we sing down the octave before returning back to the chorus and the original octave.
In a song like this, which has already been upbeat and fast and like up for the whole song, , doing a down chorus provides an opportunity to create. A moment of contrast so that when the final course does return it, once again feels exciting and up and. You know, big. It makes the final chorus feel like there was a key change, even though there really wasn't one, because you know, it goes from so low to so big.
So after the down chorus, we do a simple double repeat of the chorus and then a dance break to finish out the song. And lo and behold, we had a song as mentioned. This was my first time writing with Eitan. And I was shocked at how well we jelled and just how fast this song came together. He really is an all star songwriter and you should definitely go check out his other music.
When it came to the final production of the song, I had already had a very clear idea of what I wanted it to sound like and feel like the problem was, I didn't really know how to make that happen. About a month after our writing session, I tried to pull together a quick demo. , I was finally getting more comfortable on the guitar. And so I did a quick.
And dirty demo. You will not be hearing that because I did not keep it. I did send it to Eitan, but we both agreed that it was further from what we wanted it to sound like, then it was closer to it. So that's why I got rid of it and tried something else. , so the song was actually shelved for a little while. As I mentioned, this was right after I moved to California in 2021. So I got busy trying to get established and the song kind of fell to the wayside.
I did make a playlist of songs that were in inspiration for this song. Or at least had similar vibes. That I wanted to explore for this song. So I listened to that as a means of, um, you know, keeping myself inspired and hearing, I guess, examples of what I wanted it to sound like.
I honestly don't think that I picked this song back up until I decided that I wanted to use it for the podcast, which was almost a full year later. So. In spring 2022. I started trying to build out a track for this song.
And honestly, the time away from it was a good thing. What I didn't realize at the time was that. I was busy, leveling up and growing new skills and stuff. And for instance, I had worked my way through the first four, three to four songs for this season already. So that meant that I had all the practice and lessons learned from those songs and episodes.
And that was informing how I approached this song. For example, after writing and producing rest in episode 24. I had more of an idea of how to approach producing a more poppy sound. And kind of. So I started with the drums and found some drum samples made by the band Muna for splice.
, and I built out a drum track that had the basic beat and feel for what I imagined this song wanted to be. , Once again, inspired by some of the music on that playlist that I mentioned. I knew that I wanted it to have a sort of eighties feel, but I didn't want it to feel too much like that. So the Muna drums were a good place to start.
I also explored a couple of different samples. And I ended up using a more muted kick and snare sound in the verses and then a more open sounding, kick and snare on the chorus. Adding a high hat to the dance breaks, made those sections feel a bit more exciting. And differentiated it from the chorus. I then moved on to the bass. Again, I wanted this sort of pulsing bass feel to drive the momentum of the song. So I created a synth bass instrument with an arpeggiator on it.
I can't remember if we've talked about arpeggiator is yet on this podcast? I think we have, , but in a nutshell, it's a digital way to easily play an arpeggio. And an arpeggio is when you play a chord, for instance, a C major chord. And you play each note of the chord individually and in succession. So an arpeggiator on a digital instrument,
Allows you to play a chord and then it digitally separates each chord and plays them in succession. Arpeggiator is have many settings that you can tweak to create all sorts of interesting sounds, , including the rate at which the notes play. So you could say, okay, play every note in this chord in succession as quarter notes or as eighth notes or as 16th notes.
, in the case of this bass part, I didn't actually want it to arpeggiate a chord. , but rather I wanted it to play the bass note in quick succession at the rate of the arpeggiator. So I would, instead of playing a chord, I just played one note. And then it would go down.
and just repeat that note at the rate that I chose, which I believe was eighth notes in this case. I do use an arpeggiator with chords. but we'll get into that in just a little bit. So with the bass and drums squared away, we were off to a good start, but we needed something to carry the chords.
In our original session. Eitan. And I had envisioned more of a synthesizer sound. Again, leaning towards these sort of eighties sound palette. But somewhere along the line.
I had gotten into my head that electric guitars would be a good addition too maybe it was from that failed demo attempt. I don't know who can say. But either way, I set to creating a synth. Keys sound that felt a bit retro. And a bit like Muna, what can I say? They've been a huge influence for me recently. Love them. If you haven't listened to Muna, go listen to Muna.
Again, using an arpeggiator. I was able to play just a simple chord and then program the arpeggiator to create a pulsing rhythm. I spent a long time playing around with this, trying to get the rhythm to feel right and sound right. Eventually the thing that really tipped it over the edge for me was moving.
The inner voices of the chords to create a sort of suspended sound with each chord change. Probably again, inspired by Muna. I'm pretty sure they do this. And one of their songs. But in doing that, it brought some more life to the pulsing synth keys. And, I really liked the way it turned out.
So over the year of 2022. I suddenly somehow learned to play the guitar with some decency. This is huge because I think I've talked about it in previous episodes, but like playing the guitar was a huge mental block for me since I was like, I don't know, 14, so almost 24 years. Oh my God. Wild.
Anyways, , without dwelling on that for too long, I realized that in 2022 I could play the guitar for this song. And that was something that I wanted. So. I took a lot of time to make sure that I could actually play the chords. Well, And then I had to figure out like what strumming rhythms sounded cool. Again, this is all new to me. So those of you who are guitar players can laugh.
But I. This was new. I was like, oh my God. I have to like, decide what. , strumming rhythm would sound good. I don't know. So this was an interesting journey as like, literally, I've never really thought about that before, especially with a song of mine, because I had never had the capabilities to do anything beyond the literal most basic strum.
, but honestly I had a lot of fun doing it and I felt very musically capable after doing that. , so I recorded different guitar, strum patterns for the verse, chorus and bridge. And once I had recorded them and cleaned them up because I'm not perfect. , I actually decided that maybe there was too much guitar.
It felt heavy and muddy. So I decided that instead I would take out the guitars from the first half of the song. So that way, when they came in. In the second half of the song, the second verse, it would feel exciting and new. So once that was squared away, I decided that I wanted the melodic hook to be played on the guitar.
This melodic hook that Eitan and I came up with the, within the original demo. , so I recorded that with the guitar throughout the song. I figured out how to play it in different octaves and decided that like the vocals, which we'll talk about in a second. I could double a guitar part and play both down the octave and up, and I didn't have to do it at the same time. I could just record different layers.
Hello.
So that led me to some noodling, if you can believe. And I found a couple of other guitar, melody ideas. Specifically, this.
And honestly, I was just messing around and adding that to sort of every section, just to hear what it sounded like. And I liked it in the beginning and even in the verses. Then at the end and the final dance break, I realized I could do both the melodic hook and these little fancy bits at the same time. And it made for a sort of beautiful cacophony of guitars.
, again, this is like literally my first time multi-tracking guitar in a meaningful way. So I was just having fun and realizing like, oh my God, there's so much you could do. , so now to the vocals, so the melody of the song sits in an interesting range for me and my voice. It's not too high. But it's high enough that singing the whole song. Up, there was a bit tiring, vocally. But also singing it down. The octave was honestly too low for it to sound interesting and exciting. And for me to like project my voice and be heard.
I tried both and I wasn't crazy about either one. , and there's a term for this and it's called Tessitura, which is an Italian word. basically that means like, when you're talking about the Tessitura of a melody, you're saying the melody sits within this range of notes and that's The range is either higher or lower. And so in this case, the Tessitura was kind of high, even though it wasn't incredibly high. The fact that the whole melody just sat in that same range was high.
So. Anyways, I wasn't crazy about either singing it up or down.
But on the one hand I was, I was referencing the band bleachers and Jack Antonov does a lot of singing in this sort of lower range. And I liked the way that it sounds when he does it, but I was just like, not getting the results that I wanted when I sang it down. The octave. So. After recording both down the octave and up the octave. I decided that I would try playing both at the same time.
And lo and behold, that was what I ended up liking the most. So we have the melody being sung, both up the octave and down the octave. I don't know what that means for me singing live. I'll probably do it up the octave, but.
I don't know. We'll figure that out. Later that's for future Tim to figure out.
I didn't decide on BGVs-- background vocals until after I had the main melody. Figured out.
, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do to be completely honest. , and they came together after a couple of the previously mentioned changes, specifically the moving inner voices of the piano chords. , once I did that, then I kind of figured out, okay, I could mimic. Those chord changes in the BGVs. Especially in the chorus under shake, shake, shake. And that would be interesting.
But then, , I also decided to change the amount of shakes. And have the final chorus have four shakes, shake, shake, shake, shake to like up the intensity. And then I thought, oh, it'd be cool to keep the BGVs as the three shakes, shake, shake, shake. , and then there would be a contrasting rhythm there as well. Again, upping the sort of cacophony.
The other big thing that I decided to do with the BGVs was hard tune them. So what that means is.
Well, let me just get into it. So tuning vocals is a part of every song that you ever listened to, and there are ways to do it subtly and ways to do it more aggressively and noticeably. , so songs that are noticeably Auto-Tuned where people learn the term Auto-Tune. That's using the tool really aggressively and intentionally to create that sound.
But. You know, no voice is perfect. And. The more that we get used to hearing. Pop songs that are so clean, we have to tune our vocals to be even a little bit, but you can do it subtly so that it doesn't. Sound quite so, you know, Robotic as it were. Usually I go for a more subtle. Tuning because I don't want to sound robotic and that's a choice for me, but sometimes for effect.
It can be fun to do a, a more aggressive version of the tuning. So for the BGVs, for this song, I kind of wanted them to sound a bit unnatural, almost like they were being sung by the quote demons themselves. And so I did it. The tuning much more aggressively and noticeably., And that led me to the idea that maybe I could play around with the effects on the BGVs to make them sound like a little more weird. I didn't do too much, but in the final dance break of the song, I did crank up the delays and the reverbs on the
BGVs. And I shuffled them around a bit to make it sound like there were more demons coming to dance and they were all around you and not just. The background vocals. I don't know if that really. Fully it was successful. But I wanted to play with that.
So the song was mostly done at this point, but I still felt like it was missing something. I was learning a lot about mixing at the time. This was probably fall of 2022. And so I was trying to, I was trying all sorts of different mix techniques. But I still felt like it wasn't sparkling in the way that I wanted it to.
So after months of not being pleased with it, I decided to try literally just adding sparkle to it. So I took the arpeggiator as previously mentioned, and I changed it. to. Arpeggiate the chord that I was playing on the piano and have it cycle up and down over several octaves to give this sort of harp strum effect, you know, how harps.
Do that sort of brutal interlinked. That was kind of what I wanted to happen. But with this digital synth. Arpeggiated sound. And that was the missing piece that finally created this sparkle that I was missing. And I made it really highs and really low so that a you almost. Don't notice it, but it's, it's definitely there.
, and after this, I thought the song was done. But then as I was finally preparing to finally finish the song, I decided to add one more thing. I realized that the title dancing with your demons gave off a certain impression. That the song itself was in contrast to specifically. Demons. Doesn't usually equate to this sort of upbeat pop, rock, dance, whatever sound.
So I wanted to surprise the listener, a bit. By giving them this sort of demon-y, sounding low grumble growl, roll thing at the top, and then pairing it with a riser, which we've talked about in previous episodes. To sort of raise this tension. And then release the tension with this sort of unexpected pop rock thing.
So I found this growly demon SFX from splice and added the arpeggiated bass to it to give it some driving motion. And then I threw in the riser and voila. The song was finally completed after. Two years. Ah,
So, as I've mentioned throughout, I learned a lot through the process of working on this song. The most prominent lesson in my mind. Has to do with all the new mixing tools and techniques that I learned. While, I didn't necessarily learn these from this song. I did use this song as my playground for testing out new ideas that I did learn.
And I can really feel the difference and the growth between the first version of the song and the final version. And while I still have a long ways to go when it comes to producing. To get where I want to be with mixing. This song is emblematic of the growth that I experienced over the year 2022, honestly.
The song is also the first time that I truly felt like, okay, I can actually play the guitar. I'm still not perfect yet obviously but after i recorded the guitars for this i felt really confident in my ability to use the Guitar for songwriting purposes I also now feel like i could figure out how to play some of my other songs on the guitar Which is like a huge step towards someday Putting together a live show of my original songs and music from this podcast and otherwise and that was a really good feeling And empowering in a lot of ways. And finally this song marks a huge shift In myself as a songwriter And this show As i mentioned earlier this song was one of my first real attempts at writing a song with no other motive than to write a song that i wanted to write and i want to perform And after completing the song i felt motivated to write more and more some. some of which you might just hear here on this show And i felt a confidence within me that i was more than just a hobbyist or a novelty Explorer Like i can write from an authentic place From inspiration in my own life and i can confidently own it I think there may still be a few more songs that i wrote as exercises that i'm going to showcase on this podcast but from this point forward Most of the songs will be coming from me as a song writer And not as a composer that's trying to write songs I am now officially A songwriter And arguably yes i was before but now i I feel More confident in owning that title So with all of that said let's listen one more time Here once again Is “Dancing With Our Demons” in its entirety
50 Bad Songs is created recorded and edited by me Tim Rosko follow us on social media at 50 bad songs on twitter or x or whatever it's called now Instagram and tik tok You can listen to this song and all previous songs on band camp at 50badsongs.bandcamp.com or by streaming them on spotify and apple music just search for Tim Rosko. You can find all previous episodes on our website at www.50badsongs.com. If you'd like to financially support 50 bad songs Join our patron community at patreon.com / 50badsongs for even more behind the scenes content including exclusive playlist's lyric sheets and chord charts And other bonus content i've been writing some piano sheet music.Most importantly if you enjoyed the episode or the music you heard today the best way you can support us is by telling a friend a family member or coworker about the show send them an episode or share your favorite song of ours with them this is the best way to help our music be heard My name is Tim Rosko and thank you so much for listening.
