Over the summer of 2017, I had a psychotic breakdown. I was seeing the world around me as a series of illusions, and I started to fear that seeing things that way would eventually lead me to insanity. Sometimes it felt like I was really falling off the edge. My friends and family were super helpful during this time, giving me all kinds of advice and support. I couldn’t be more thankful to them for that.
In this time, I also discovered just how powerful of a tool music was for me. Writing songs was like a reliable safety net. Though as time went on, the fears would still get me now and then. I couldn’t ever stop them for good.
One of the worst cases was two years after the original panic, on a college orientation hiking trip. I woke up in the pitch-black middle of the woods surrounded by other students sleeping. It was something about not being able to see anything or make a single sound that got to me. There was nothing to see, no one to talk to, no instruments, no safety net. I was alone in my head for hours. The next morning, I left the hiking trip early. The orientation leader and my friend Julien walked me out of the woods and I was transported to a different orientation group. This group slept in a big house every night and went for scenic walks during the day, which was a much better environment for me at the time. My friend Colin was also in this group, so I had someone I knew I could talk to.
One night on the trip, everyone was sitting around a fire and this guy Nick told a beautiful poem about a willow tree. While he was telling it, I could already feel something happening. There was music there. I was hearing heavy guitars and drums in my head as he was talking. “I am the willow, I am the willow.” The next day I started hearing this drum fill in my head that I really wanted to use in the song. Colin brought a guitar on the trip so I used it that day to start writing.
My skills on the guitar are super limited, so there were only a few options for what I could physically play. I tuned the guitar to drop D because I knew I wanted heaviness and I just started bashing on 9th chords. It was easy for me to play and very satisfying. It was the only music I heard in days because we weren’t allowed any technology on the trip. I just kept bashing until I started playing a syncopated rhythm. I wrote the rhythm down on a napkin so I could explain it to Colin, and so I could remember it later.
For the rest of the trip, I was just cooking up the song in my head, like… nonstop. There wasn’t much else to do. We’d be walking around as a group, doing activities like talking to trees, and I just kept working on the song in my head. There was so much time to spare that most of the song was written by the time we got back to the campus.
Once we were back on campus, I came up with the bridge guitar riff in a dream. I dreamt that Julien was playing it on the guitar. In my half-awake state I yelled to Colin, asking him if Julien got a recording of the riff that Julien wrote. He was like “Dude, Julien doesn’t play the guitar”. I had to quickly remember the riff from my dream and record it on my phone haha. Nick told me I could use his poem for the song, and my friends Kim and Julien helped me add the finishing touches to the lyrics.
