Book 5: MONTANA SKY

By complete chance and the mysterious workings of the universe, ‘Montana Sky’ came to have the most diverse concoction of inspiration behind it. The first one came from the title of a travel / adventure book I once stumbled upon. It read (quite simply) ‘Montana Sky’ and immediately transported me back to one of the most magical trips of my life. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to take a summer road trip through Yellowstone and Montana. It was that summer feeling of infinite possibility that I remember most deeply - tanned hands gently weaving through open car windows, bright blue skies, the sheer awe of the vastness of open valleys and fields, covered in tall grass that sway calmly in the breeze.

There’s something about road trips, especially summer road trips that bring out the existentialist within me. Watching landscapes change and melt into one another in front of your eyes, seeing so much life play out in a matter of seconds.

I dug through my phone to find some photos from that road trip:

Then, add into this mix - a TV show that completely captivated me at the time I was writing this song (Hulu’s ‘A Murder At the End of the World’). I kept coming back to a scene in the first episode where the two main characters are on a road trip through the American west, driving on a highway in the blue light (you’re seeing where this is going, right?). They’re listening to and attempting to sing along to a song that clearly neither of them know that well - Annie Lennox’s ‘No More I Love Yous’ (you should definitely listen that song, so I linked it for you HERE hehe).

It was this very scene that ended up inspiring the chorus of the song:

I had been wanting to write a country song for the longest time. When we first moved to the US, me and my dad would often drive alone, either to go get groceries or home from school. During those drives, he would always play country music radio. There was something so hopeful and comforting about it - everything about America seemed so new and distant at the time, but hearing people sing about heartbreak and growing up in this land, made it somehow feel closer, more tangible.

Maybe it’s fitting that the first real country song I wrote talks about driving on a highway. :)

After having this chorus done, however, I hadn’t been able to come up with anything else for weeks. The lyrics and storytelling were so intimate and descriptive that it was difficult for me to grasp what the rest of the song would say. That’s when the last puzzle piece of information comes in: AI. As I was working on this song earlier in the year, there was a big boom of companies using AI to generate audio (think Udio or Suno). There was so much AI music being created, a lot of it (if prompted cleverly), indiscernible from a human-written song. It was this wave of content and narrative that almost felt like a challenge for me to try and capture something so intrinsically human that it wouldn’t possibly be put together by an LLM.

And what is more human than questioning your very existence, coming to terms with your own mortality?

As I sat down to start producing the song, I immediately began stacking and layering instruments: glittering pads, rhythmic synths, you name it. But the more I added in, the more I felt the song slipping away.

It was as if with each new element I brought into the production, the song’s nostalgic, melancholic, heart-wrenching yet hopeful feeling faded away. It was then that I decided to do something I’ve only ever done a few times before: I started deleting and muting tracks. I got rid of absolutely everything until all that was left was my demo vocal and the piano. I sat down at my keyboard and played through the piano track one more time, this time all in a single take and without any extra edits. The dynamics and rhythm moved with the song and all at once, it was alive once again.

I realized (in hindsight, ridiculously late in the process) that a song about the human experience had to feel as human as possible. So I sent the demo out to Yoed for strings, Chris for drums, and Victor for guitar and bass. This is what they sent back:

As you can hear, each of these tracks includes some breaths, little background noises or clicks, all capturing the life inside which they were recorded.

I love how imperfect they are - created by masterful musicians who are playing in the moment, capturing a lifetime of work and practice through 3 minutes of music.

And that’s kind of what ‘Montana Sky’ is all about: finding meaning in being alive within a magical collision of events that created our little world - all of our human chaos and beauty taking place on a tiny rock just endlessly floating through space.