Since January’s guest writer week, where I spoke about my life with Cystic Fibrosis, I have been focusing on my music and I have released another single called ‘Moonlight Skaters’! As a songwriter, I have learnt that the work is continuous and I am always coming up with new material to be produced and released.
I started to work on the track in November, with a family friend of ours, Ryan; and we ended up recording the song remotely for the full duration of the creative process. I remember our first inspirations for the song were ‘Dynamite’ by BTS and ‘Don’t Start Now’ by Dua Lipa and through development, the inspirations for the instrumental and lyrics grew.
In lockdown, some of the music that was in the charts at the time or popular on social media platforms, such as TikTok, had a high percentage of danceability and/or positivity. I have always wanted to create a song that is very upbeat and shows a different side of me, and when Ryan presented to me the ideas he came up with, I knew this would be a song I could develop into a bop. At the time, I listened to some amazing tracks from previous decades for inspiration to write the lyrics. Some examples were ‘Kiss’ by Prince, ‘Let’s Dance’ by David Bowie, ‘Murder On The Dancefloor’ by Sophie Ellis-Bextor and even the Hamilton soundtrack!
The theme of roller skating came about from seeing other people roller skating, not to mention the moonlight rollers community. I wrote the chorus of ‘Moonlight Skaters’ in the first few days of production when we had a basic instrumental demo. When we had an idea of what the theme of the track would be, the rest of the lyrics came along quite easily. It was visible that from the chorus, I was relating to not wanting to waste my time on someone who did not care as much about me as I cared about them and realising my worth throughout that. For example, “Under these disco lights, I’m roller skating into moonlight” is a very powerful line – where the “disco lights” acts as the positive vibes, and “skating into moonlight” is seen as looking into the future and not turning back for nobody. As the lyrics formed together, this theme became more of a trend and consciousness to me as I went along. Growth is something that I wanted to express particularly in my music because it is an emotional experience that everybody goes through at some point in their life.
As previously mentioned, I recorded the song remotely with Ryan… I recall recording the vocals in my bedroom at 8 pm and trying to reach the high notes in the bridge multiple times as I wanted to make sure the tone and voice quality was immaculate throughout. Many considerations were made when recording the vocals using the Scarlett 2i2 studio package, as the condenser microphone was sensitive, and recording in a place where there was a high quantity of ambience would have affected the recording quality of the vocals so I had to be in a room with a lot of furniture. We had a few vocal takes of the song before recording the final version. In terms of the production, one of the creative ideas I wanted to be included was the panning on “shine” in the outro and I was really happy with the final outcome.
Overall, it was an amazing experience working on the song and I hope it is something that can be listened to at any time; whether that is making a cup of coffee in the morning, travelling via your daily commute or just simply dancing in your house for no reason. The lockdown music video for ‘Moonlight Skaters’ has now been released on YouTube and you can find the link here: https://youtu.be/UfOcef6Z_tg
I cannot wait to be releasing more music in the future, and speaking of the future I’ve recently just released another track called ‘Lost In The City”, which is a collaboration with producer, Kian Tony. The song focuses on escaping the issues that we face and travelling somewhere where you love, with someone you care about. From my perspective, that place is Japan and I wanted to make links to such a beautiful country – a place that I would love to visit again soon. It is different from my recent works but it does share a few similarities with my debut single, ‘Feet’, which was released last year at the start of the pandemic.
You can listen to Kian Tony and Lucy Crisp’s track, ‘Lost In The City’ here:
https://push.fm/ps/lostinthecity
I’m also currently working on the production of my debut EP which is very exciting! In comparison to ‘Moonlight Skaters’, the writing process has been much longer and as of current, most of the songs that will feature were written last year. I really do hope it will be worth the wait for everyone to listen to and the lyrics do come from the brutal inner core of myself.