Behind the song: Stockholm
Stockholm is a song that I wrote in my dorm room at university in 2021. I was doing laundry and daydreamed of a place my partner, and I visit yearly to see family. It is a truly beautiful place in northern Maine, and I often miss the area's peace and beauty.
When it rains we can see this waterfall on the drive through the woods
There is something so special and almost sacred about visiting somewhere annually. It really feels like a set time and place to take a deep, cleansing breath and hit the refresh button on life. I often find myself functioning as a human rather than a human being, but when we visit this place, I feel like I can just be. Everything slows to a pace where I can finally keep up. A place where I feel truly rested when I wake up.
When I wrote Stockholm, I wanted to try to capture that feeling of being in the woods with someone you love and feeling free to exhale all of the negativity and step out from underneath whatever stressors might be weighing you down.
In my mind, I pictured playing guitar by a fire. Sometimes the fire was outside in the woods but other times the fire was inside in a fireplace while rain tapped against the windows. I wanted the song to feel intimate in that the listener was brought to that fire, wherever it may be, and was in that moment with me.
A longtime friend and mentor, Dave Barrett, funded this song's recording process as a graduation gift in 2022, which I am incredibly grateful for as it made me realize that I can create music and share it with the world.
While working on it in the studio, we started with a demo I had made in my dorm using GarageBand on my iPad. We brought the demo to Waysound Recording Studio in Fox River Grove, Illinois, where Justin LeBreck could work his magic.
The original demo was just guitar, vocals, and strings. We laid down a new guitar track with Dave playing to capture the warmth of a real acoustic guitar rather than the midi guitar track I had originally used in GarageBand. I am so glad he got to be part of what you hear when listening to Stockholm.
Justin was able to add some horns on the keys, which I think really helped to round out the sound of the song. We didn’t think of adding horns until we listened to it in the studio after laying down the vocals, and we realized that the song needed more warmth.
Stockholm was released on December 9, 2022, and putting the song out into the world is one of the greatest decisions I have ever made. I hope you like it, and I look forward to sharing more music with you soon.
Until then,
inad lzbth
