CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

CO-PRODUCER

I am absolutely jealous that I didn’t get to write on this record. Kelsy showed this song to me the day after she wrote it and I loved it because it was nothing like anything she had done before. She wrote it with Sammy Witte and he did the original production on it as well. A couple weeks before the song was going to be released, her and her team felt it wasn’t fully Kelsy yet. So they asked me to come in and add production to it that’s what I did. Just added a some dynamics and a lil juice.

FINAL SESSION SCREEN SHOT

*Too many tracks to fit in the screen

“God Knows I’ve Tried” was written on January 18th of 2018. It was written by Kelsy Karter, Anders Grahn and myself at my home studio, The Stable. Kelsy came into the session with the idea of writing something super personal that day, before we started writing she told us she wanted to cry that day, and she definitely did. We were toying with concepts and I blurted out “God Knows I’ve Tried To Be Good”, it was a title that I’ve had on my phone song list for a year or so. Kelsy loved it but said there needed to be a something a little edgier for it to relate to her life. I can’t remember if it was Anders or Kelsy, but one of them brilliantly came up with putting Baby I’ve Been Bad before my title to make it more of a confessional.

The chord structure of this song is pretty confusing. One of my favorite memories from this session was Anders playing my guitar and playing these super beautiful chords and we got to the refrain and the only thing that felt right was hanging one chord for a weird length of time. He told me it was weird and then asked if that was ok, and then we all decided that it doesn’t matter if it fits standards, it just felt right and we couldn’t beat it. We were definitely going for an ode to a Queen style record with this one. We wanted it to build and be grand to match the lyrical content.

Fun Facts: There are no real drums in this song, all programmed by me. Hudson Thames is playing the piano in the bridge through the end. NoMBe recorded some of the really cool guitar noises on this song. The last chorus was longer where Kelsy absolutely slayed some belty vocals but it got cut.

Kelsy brought this song to me as an idea somewhere in 2016 but we started working on it at the beginning of 2017. She had most of the lyrics and her and I dove in and restructured the song and tweaked some of the melodies. Looking through my hard drive, this song had 18+ different versions before we finally felt we had landed in the right place for the tone and vibe of the song. I finished this song towards the end of 2017 and once summer rolled around in 2018, Kelsy and her team decided to pull the trigger on it so I mixed it and thats it.

Heres a voice memo from the first time Kelsy brought the song idea to me in 2017.

Easy Tiger was hands down one of the easiest and most thrilling songs to write with Kelsy Karter. Initially we had received a couple of guitar track ideas from co-writers Anders Grahn & Rob Kleiner. So we took our laptops to the roof, overlooking Hollywood with the stars on the street down below, and started to write. There was something so potent about that moment, the first words out of our mouths make up 90% of the final chorus in the song. The lyrics and melody were already floating around and we just happened to be looking up at the right time to hear them. 

Kelsy & I started writing this song in July of 2017. It was kind of magic the way it happened. A lot of her music takes us a couple of writes to really nail, but this one was different. Most of the original lyrics and melody's were from that one day of writing. 

Here is a voice memo from the writing session and you can hear her singing a different pre-chorus from the final song. 

In the weeks to follow I started laying down the instruments and came up that Beatles-ish guitar riff under the pre-chorus. When I showed her the rough production she had the genius idea of having her vocal follow the guitar riff and the song was complete. 

OUT OF DRUGS

WRITER | PRODUCER | MIXER | MASTER