Book 3: TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH

It’s a warm June 2023 afternoon, I’m sitting in my bedroom and looking out of the window as the sun sets behind the golden hills that sit quietly in the background of our house. My windows are wide open and I can see the gentle summer breeze caress the trees and roses in the backyard. The cicadas are warming up for their evening chorus, the birds eagerly chirping their interludes. It’s perfect. The sheer simplicity of the moment strikes me: this will never happen again. I’m here, right now, experiencing the profoundly uncomplicated magic of being alive. As it has already so often done throughout my life, the world once again found a way of reminding me of how remarkable it is. And with that awe - heartbreak. The sudden realization of the transience of it all. A deep sadness that it won’t, it can’t last forever. An awareness that bubbles up every now and then of the importance of being present, of soaking it all in while it lasts.

I had been trying to write a song that would capture that feeling for SO many years and in that moment, I had an intangible sensation that I could finally put that whirlwind of emotions into words. So I sat down at the piano in my room, windows still open, birds still singing, and wrote the chorus of ‘To Tell You The Truth’:

As I was writing it, I started thinking about my grandparents who live in Slovenia. The feeling of the fleeting nature of time started broadening out from moments, and spilling into people. How unfair it is that we get a limit on how long we get to experience all this beauty, connect and get to know the ones that mean the most to us? Then, as my thoughts were swirling out of control, I came to a realization: when you truly, fully, deeply love someone, no amount of time you could spend with them would ever be enough.

And that’s what the song would ultimately be about. The heartache of knowing it must all come to an end, intertwined with the joy of getting to experience it in the first place.

Fast forward 6 months and I had pretty much forgotten about the song until I needed something to post on TikTok in late February of this year and found the chorus of it in my drafts.

I kept listening to that chorus on loop, over and over again. The melodies instantly felt very Disney so I thought it would be a great addition to our little Bookstore - a soft spring ballad about the magic and heartbreak of time.

As I sat down and started producing it, I knew I wanted to it to parallel the experience of watching a Pixar movie. The colors are always so vibrant and alive, the world-building is beautiful and when you’re a child, it’s a fairytale. But the true mastery of these movies lies in the hidden meanings and messages: as you get older and understand the world better, you start to notice little details that add depth to the one-dimensional story you knew as a child.

My idea was to create something similar with ‘To Tell You the Truth’ - the production would be sparkling and gentle, as if you were listening to a Disney soundtrack. Then, as you start paying attention to the lyrics, you begin to notice the much deeper, more heartbreaking nature of the song.

I always like to anchor my productions around a main melodic motif and I thought it would be a cool idea to come up with something that could stay in the same loop / pattern for the whole song. So after some trials and errors, I came up with this acoustic guitar pattern that would go on to represent the concept of infinity throughout the song:

I decided to build the entire song around this motif, so as the production grows and swells, this melody gets echoed in other instruments:

I also wanted to add some of that “magical pixie dust” sound that we associate with Disney soundtracks so I went on a hunt for what that mystical, evasive element is. After listening through some of my Disney favorites, I found that the missing puzzle piece is harp. A harp!!

So I went ham on it (can a pun be made here, and I say “harp on it”??) and came up with this that still sounds to me like Tinkerbell frantically flying around Wendy’s room:

As the hours went by, the production was piecing itself together and I was well on my way to being done (which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising to me because grandiose, over-the-top production was always kind of my favorite indulgence hehe).

It was already getting late into the evening when I decided this song needs a little strings interlude between the second chorus and the bridge (of course, classic Anja). In an attempt to try and find a fitting melody for said strings interlude, I started looking up fairy / magical forest playlists on Youtube (this song already felt like a little fairy forest village). As I was sitting there, listening through these aesthetically pleasing playlists, I noticed a lot of the songs and melodies sounded very Celtic. Hmmm, interesting. Then, I started wondering what makes something sound Celtic? So I Googled it. Apparently, most Celtic music is written in the pentatonic scale (aka 5 consecutive whole steps). Hmmm, even more interesting. Then I thought that maybe it would be cool to try and play some of the vocal melody of ‘To Tell You The Truth’ on the piano. And lo and behold, the chorus of the song is written in the pentatonic scale. Hmmm, the most interesting.

As it turns out, I unintentionally wrote a Celtic forest fairy song. Great, spicy, unexpected, perfect. It felt important to drive the whole pentatonic point home so I wrote these strings melodies for the interlude that put a little bow on top of the whole production.

I cried when I was writing this song and, in true Diver fashion, I cry when I listen to it now. It seeps into my life as a reminder of the fragility and finite nature of everything around us. Yet, it makes me hopeful that in this awareness, we can create our own little infinity - by listening and observing and connecting and reveling in the magic of the universe that we get to temporarily inhabit.