Behind the Music
I mind map a lot. It's simple: hit record, play whatever's in my head, don't judge it, don't fix it. Most of what comes out stays exactly as it landed, and I have a firm rule that I don't go back and re-record them. The whole point is that they're a moment, not a product.
"Broken" broke the rule.
What came out that day was slow and spacious, closer to New Age than anything I usually make, and it came from a genuinely dark place. I was lonely. I felt, in more ways than I wanted to admit, broken. The recording was honest about that, and I figured it would live in the archive with everything else.
But I kept going back to it. And the more time I spent listening, the more I heard something the melody was doing underneath the sadness. There was a drive in there. A pulse, buried but insistent, that hadn't come from anywhere I could point to. It was as if the piece knew something I didn't.
Following that pulse is what led me to the Spanish acoustic guitar and the Middle Eastern percussion. Neither is common in my work, and I didn't reach for them as decoration. They were what the hidden rhythm turned out to be asking for. The moment they came in, the piece stopped sitting still. It stood up and started walking.
So "Broken" isn't the song it started as. The dark, lonely origin is still in the DNA, and I wouldn't strip it out even if I could. But the tune traveled somewhere. It became a piece about self-reflection that doesn't end in the mirror, about being ready to go out and meet the world again with new eyes.
Sometimes a title stops describing a condition and starts describing where you began.