If you would’ve told me a year ago that I would be releasing four of the demos from my EP today, I would’ve said two things: 1) ‘Demos before the polished versions? That’s not how people release music Kelly’ and 2) ‘Are they not ready and polished? What happened?’

Today I respond back to that me, still uncomfortable with the idea of putting out anything frankly, with a loving “1) I don’t care, 2) yeah but also if I don’t put out anything before the end of the year I’m gonna explode. So I’m doing it scared. And 3) I know you didn’t have a third thing but doing it like this has a deeper meaning now.”

Truth is, it’s been a very messy year — quite possibly the messiest year I’ve had. I have spent most of the year either numb from the present, lost and trying to understand the past, and confused about the future. But more on that in a later post.

The thing that I’ve learned about messiness is that leaning into it makes it easier to create order from it. By working on my music for the first time, I’ve been heavily stewing in the idea that change doesn’t happen by wishful thinking. It happens through little leaps of faith. As much as you want your first leap to be Olympic-level graceful, it’s more likely that you’ll be like a baby giraffe taking its first steps. And that’s absolutely ok.

So yeah, this is messy of me to put out. But the whole point of this project is that. I wrote all the songs that will be in this project in very messy states of being. And it makes sense to me to put them out in a messy first step.

Now disclaimer, these are only half of the songs that will be on the EP. The other half have a bit more work to be done. I chose these four songs because I first played each of these songs on Instagram. In a way, that is actually the first demo of these songs. You’ll hear the polished versions of these songs and the other half when my EP I Should Have Said Something Earlier… releases on February 7, 2025.

I wanted to take this space to tell you about these messy, messy songs because I’m proud of them and they each had a huge life lesson to unpack. So here we go.

Now Hiring

I have had so much fun producing this song. But I wrote it in a Regina George style fit of rage. Back in March 2021, I was focused on healing after selling my soul to a toxic working environment for my first 2 years out of college. That first job was not at all what I had hoped for (minus the financial stability it gave me right out of college) and by the end of 2020, it had greatly contributed to the fact that I had landed at the darkest place mentally/spiritually/emotionally I’ve ever gotten to. It was no one in particular’s fault, I was simply meant to learn through it that I am so much more than what I do for work…the hard way.

So the story goes that my literal best friend calls me one night in March 2021 (she was still working there) to say “hey, I’m not entirely sure if this is the truth, I have a feeling it’s not but just in case — I wanted to apologize if I’ve ever said anything to you that sounded like bullying.” I was so confused. She went on to explain that someone that company was going around saying that I had been bullied into leaving the company at the end of 2020. I burst out with a witch’s cackle at the irony. In my eyes, if there was anyone who had bullied me, it was the company’s leadership who had (save for maybe one manager that had his heart in the right place).

I began reflecting on all the things I had done during my time at that company to try to contort myself into the version of me that these people (and what I thought my parents expected of me post-college) saw as successful. And it broke my heart in a very angry way. So I took those things and put it into this song.

When I got hired at my last company and it felt like a dream come true, my first day was spent playing with the company’s music production tools…and finding the exact guitar tone for the song I’d written about my time at my first job. It was magic. And I cackled that same witch’s laugh. Basically, the seed had been planted to make this song really come to life.

Sonically, I was really inspired by classic rock by way of Olivia Rodrigo influenced female rage. I grew up loving classic rock and always thought it was a weirdly strategic thing that I could connect with old white men I have nothing else in common with because of it. Like I used to feel a sense of pride that I was not like other kids, I knew real music. (Yikes.) So I took that idea and spun this song up in that direction as a hint to the ways I’d learned to charm my way into a sort of upward mobility.

Out of My Mind, Out of My Sight

This was the first song I started to produce, but the writing of it goes all the way back to 2017.

I was a junior in college trying to do some really cool things while actively avoiding a heartbreak that had overstayed its welcome. I had met a guy while studying abroad in Shanghai the summer after my freshman year. He was a talented pianist and violin player and I just really liked hanging out with him. At the end of our time there, I told him that plus the fact that I wanted to be more than friends. He said he really liked hanging out with me too but wasn’t sure how it’d work since I was coming back to the city for my sophomore year and he was going back to school in the States. We decided to keep in touch and stay friends but I definitely lost my mind in the process.

When I returned to Shanghai, I constantly wandered around the places we used to hang out trying to nurse my lovesick heart. We would catch up via Skype while I was in Shanghai and when I was back in the States for the holidays, we would find times to meet up. But that unintentional breadcrumbing began to take a toll. I had spent a year and a half pining after this boy and annoying/concerning my friends in the process. But it wasn’t until I threw a fit about not being able to see his Christmas violin recital in late 2016 that I realized how deep in the hole I had gotten. After telling my friend Katie about the tantrum I had thrown, she very lovingly told me that it was time to move on.

By that point, I’d already been trying to do things to move on but I realized I had to accept that I needed to fully move on now. One night in my dorm room in the second semester of junior year, I felt particularly sad. I had made strides to get involved with new opportunities that would get me out of my head, but that night I needed to just cry it out. So I wrote this song.

It was a moment of me needing to reflect the reality and say the words that I needed to hear as much as I could because then they’d become true. After I had written it, I knew I had something special in my hands.

Revisiting this song in production was the longest process. I first started noodling on a DAW for this song in February 2021 when I put it out into the universe that I wanted to learn how to produce. It was fun getting to know my way around a DAW but not quite what I was envisioning. It wasn’t until I formally decided to make this whole project happen that I got back to it in summer 2023. I made a lot of headway on the demo in the first part of 2024 and I wanted to release it in March. But after showing it to a few of my producer pals at my old company, I realized I still had a lot of work to do on it and it wasn’t quite where I was envisioning it going.

Sonically, I was inspired by big orchestral pop songs. Think Hello by Adele (which I definitely listened to on repeat while I was in Shanghai with a lovesick heart). I feel like I broke through on it recently when I decided to really lean into the idea of me becoming sure of the words with each chorus so that by the end of it it’s a bit of an explosion. I’m really proud of it.

Escape Pod (Leave It)

Oh this song. I wrote this song in June 2021 about a situation that happened in summer 2019. It was the first time I’d ever truly dated someone and it had in fact taken all of the 2020 lockdown to understand what had happened.

So, I met this guy on Bumble in late May 2019 and it felt like the most exciting thing ever because everything was a first with him.

He was super invested at the start: texting me everyday, initiating plans, introducing me to his friends, being curious about me and my life. But then he started losing interest. I had picked up on the fact that every now and again in conversation he would bring up his ex from the previous year but I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t a concern. But then it was too late.

At the end of August, we had gone on a date where I finally got to introduce him to some of my friends but he was acting so weird towards me. I ended up sleeping over at his place, desperate for a validation of our connection. But instead I anxiously slept next to a total stranger.

By September, we had gone weeks without seeing each other and my anxiety began to peak. I couldn’t sleep, I wanted to cry, I wanted to say something but what could I say? After taking some time to think through what I would do if he wanted to keep seeing me versus how to end things, I decided to confront him about it. When we met up for the last time, he told me he had started comparing that ex with me and that he had lost the spark. So we ended things.

At first, I cried my heart out. I tried to feel a sense of gratitude for him because it was the first time I got to experience actually reciprocated feelings for a time. But eventually, I found myself feeling very angry about it. So angry that I wrote a really unhinged song…but more on that one later.

After taking all of 2020 to process all my feelings about that failed relationship, I was over it. But I still had all these sweet lines I had written about this relationship floating around in my notes app. So I found them a home as I wrote this song. I remember trying to make this song be angry and vindictive but I couldn’t make it work — there needed to be a profound sadness to it. But I didn’t know why. Eventually I realized I wrote this song as a way to realize what actually had happened: him and I used each other to escape our deeper issues. While he was trying to avoid his feelings about his ex with me, I was trying to avoid confronting my deeper issue of always needing external validation for some reason. Overall, he made me angry but that version of me made me sad.

So sonically, I wanted to capture both of those emotions kind of coexisting. Like “Out of My Mind, Out of My Sight”, this one also explodes at the end but the sadness lingers. I definitely leaned into a bit of influence from The Killers by using some vibey synths with a rock flair.

Unscathed

I’m so proud of the grungy sound I achieved with this song. And the amount of times I went trigger happy with distortion on this song is directly proportional to the murky situation I wrote this song about.

I wrote this song in April 2022 after the messiest friendship breakup I’ve ever had. The year before, I had made a new friend at church who was quite eager to be my friend. Now maybe that should’ve been a sign because I remember feeling this person’s enthusiasm and choosing to move forward with a sense of caution as we got to know each other. This person would go on to share with me that they had lot of trauma in their life and I felt called to make space for it. This person was beautifully complicated and I wanted to do my best to love them as best as I could.

In November 2021, our mutual friend who was living with my family and I at the time came to me with an impassioned “we need to do something to help this friend, they’re in a lot of need”. Our friend had been dealing with a heavy load of financial problems that compounded when they said a family member had gotten sick and they needed to go visit them. With the holidays in full swing, I resolved to set up a crowdfunding page to help lessen this friend’s stress. People rallied for this person and it made me happy to see…until it blew up in our faces.

In essence what happened is that doubt was cast on this person’s whole situation. This person had reached out to our church for financial help previously and had just sent out a second ask. Since they weren’t hearing back in a timely manner, they started telling me and our mutual friend about it. As I had spread the word for the crowdfunding page, our community group leaders started pulling me aside to give me a word of caution about this person. They recognized my heart being in the right place here but they wouldn’t explain why they were telling me to be careful with this person. What ensued was a situation where I didn’t know who to trust: this friend I’d only known for a few months or the people I’d been in community with for years. Our community group leaders eventually got the church fund leaders involved and they asked me to surrender the crowdfunding page to them to handle because they had already been planning to help this friend out. It boiled down to the fact that this friend had gotten themselves into financial trouble a second time and since they had gone to the fund leaders first, they wanted to be able to handle it properly so this friend wouldn’t continue in a cycle.

This friend ended up getting angry with me and calling me shady for letting the fund leaders handle it. The truth was I had not understood how out of my depth I was in this situation. That friend had never explained how or why they had ended up in so much financial trouble but I did get the sense that there was something they weren’t telling me. I didn’t want to pry so I tried to handle it detached. But by trying to be detached, I ended up causing them pain without meaning to and it made me sad because that was the last thing I wanted to do.

I ended up cutting things off this friend at the beginning of January 2022 while they dealt with the church fund leaders because I realized there was nothing I could do. A couple months later, this friend had planned to post on their Instagram an “exposé” of all the people that had wronged them in the situation. It scared me to think that they had ill-will towards me when I really didn’t mean to hurt them. But my sadness turned to anger because I started to see that this friend had so quickly decided that I was against them. It made me feel like our friendship had been based on what I could do for them: the love I could give this person, the time I could give them…the money I could bring to them. I had painfully seen my savior complex at play and I had to own that. But also, this person seemed to operate in a very “either you’re with me or against me” way and I didn’t think that was fair. And that made me angry.

So that’s murky water is where I wrote the song from. I realized I’d been in similar friendships before and that my parents had been in similar situations, so I got angry in a way that could only be explained by the breaking of a generational curse. That situation broke a lot of things: my relationship to that community, my relationship to the church, that friendship, and my understanding of generosity. I’ve not been as open and quick to make friends or be generous since.

But I’m proud of the way I took time to recognize that more than one thing can be true here. I could be heartbroken about the fact that I had hurt someone. I could be angry about the fact that there was nothing else I could do to fix it for this person. But also I could be angry about the fact that I let this person take advantage of me. I could also feel betrayed by everyone else in this situation. And I channeled that messily into this song.

Sonically, I couldn’t get Beverly Hills by Weezer out of my head oops. I thought it would be fun to have some really distorted guitars contrast with my sweet voice and an equally sweet-sounding vibraphone.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I have four more demos to cleanup and maybe share before the end of the year. Let me know if you want to hear them messy, maybe I’ll do another write-up for those songs. But yeah, then I get to polish them all for release. Thanks for listening and reading if you got this far. You don’t know how much this whole project means to me.