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Cover art by Circlejourney circlejourney Bandcamp circlejourney SoundCloud Circlejourney YouTube circlejourneyart Tumblr circlejourney Twitter circlejourney.net Other machinasolis SoundCloud.
Released 8/8/2023.
Duration: ~8:13.

Listen on Spotify or YouTube (playlist).

View commentary page!

1. (4:07) Wherever You Were
2. (4:06) Wherever You Were (Choral)

Added to wiki 4/13/2024.

Artist commentary:

Circlejourney:

☁️🌊 the sky and the sea try for centuries to reach each other.

This is a character song for Marin and Cielo, the leads of my webcomic Compass. Many thanks to Céleste for lending her vocal talents to the song and taking on Marin's part so wonderfully 💙 Check out her music and other works at: https://pinkie.horse

Circlejourney: (Tumblr commentary)

I'm proud to share Wherever You Were, a song about Marin and Cielo from my webcomic Compass! The sea and the sky, gazing at each other since the start of time, yet unable to reach each other.

My friend @irlpinkiepie sang Marin's part, I couldn't be happier that we got to collaborate. Check out her music and other works here!

OK so. I typed up a big ramble about the process of making this song, which was more complicated than almost anything else I’ve ever done - gonna tack it on here, in case that interests anyone…

THE SONGWRITING BIT

I didn’t know what this song would become when I started it. It was just a piano doodle that eventually became the 8-bar refrain in the intro. Almost off the bat, though, I began to feel like it was showing my Vienna Teng + 2010s Broadway influence - you can really hear the Stray Italian Greyhound and Harbor in it, with a side of…something else, maybe A Thousand Miles?

It became apparent that the instrumental was missing a melody, so I also started to draft one by humming (it’s how I do it on most of my music now). The first line “All my life / I’ve sought a safer seashore” emerged pretty quickly.

With the melody + rhythm that was forming, I wanted an AABBA rhyme scheme starting with this line - like a limerick, but with the last few lines way more clipped. “And felt like I wanted something more / Than to watch the days go by / What am I / Waiting here for?” These got written quite effortlessly as well.

I really liked the play on expectations with “What am I… / waiting here for?” earlier, so I echoed that structure in the second half, with “Going where… / ever you were.”

• Second half of the chorus is my favourite part of this whole song btw. One of my favourite set of rhymes that I’ve ever written.

Up till this point, I wasn’t sure what the song was about, other than dreaming of travelling on the ocean. I actually thought it would turn into an Offshore song at first. But as it went, the second half of the chorus mentioned the POV character sailing in search of something, and I went…that doesn’t make sense, why are they waiting on the shore in the first half, and then sailing in the second half. What if it were two characters…wait that’s just Compass?

Once I knew it was about Marin and Cielo, I distinguished the voices: Cielo’s part would have the “soaring” notes and Marin’s would be an octave below. I also threw in the melodic quote from Coastal Dreaming (which is very near and dear to me). After the chorus I pulled my favourite key change (tonic major to submediant major) and then, moved into the verse.

I have to confess: the first 2.5 lines actually wholesale quote a less-known Homestuck fan track I made, appropriately titled On An Island Far Away. Doubly appropriate because the Compass comic has a few Homestuck references, too.

At this point, most of my lyrical and musical choices were trying to convey a sentiment of, to quote the venerable Ms Jepsen, “before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.” I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of longing for, or missing, something you have never known, or a sense of déjà vu, which Compass is also very much about. Quoting my older music that I haven’t listened to in a while was a personal indulgence of that feeling.

Following on that, I did a mirrory thing again with this verse’s lyrics:

• “What is forecast” <=> “What’s this memory”

• “What is glowing out at sea” <=> “What is gazing from the shore”

• “Voice from the past / My future bliss” <=> “Voice from a dream / A truth I miss”

• Combining the rhymes of these two halves with “For me” (“for” rhymes with “shore”, “me” rhymes with “sea”)

• I was going for the visual of Marin and Cielo looking longingly out at the shore / the sea, but not quite sure what they’re longing for?

This verse actually also gestures to the Coastal Dreaming lyrics I had in my head for years, though I never wrote them down: “for I am sailing between our worlds / you are the light waiting on the shore for me / you are the sky spreading out its endless wings / and I’m the sea // for I am sailing, alone on the tide / you are the bells of the port, ringing for me / you are my journey, and every story / is a dream I dream”

I wrote the bridge with the AABBA rhyme scheme, and the line “I will bend… …time to find you” to once again echo that structure I mentioned farther up. All of this lyric stuff happened almost effortlessly, I didn’t have to think too hard about the rhymes, they were just always right there. Which never happens. Wild.

THE PERFORMANCE/PRODUCTION BIT

I sang both parts in the demo, but I found that I couldn’t reliably hit the B2 in Marin’s part. I didn’t like the way it sounded with my voice, so I began to consider collaborators. I thought of @ irlpinkiepie first because she’s read Compass and also has known my music for a long time. I had heard her singing once (incidentally the song in question was appropriate to making the connection too) - anyway if you’re reading this post rn, thank you so so much for agreeing to collab. You absolutely killed it and I was so pleased hearing those harmonies for the first time.

Something about having different vocalists for different characters really cements it as a character song, and for that reason I was happy I got to do Cielo’s part (he’s one of my all time OC faves), and as an actual duet instead of harmonising with myself as usual.

Pinkie’s part was recorded with a webcam mic, which meant certain frequencies had to be “unearthed” from the audio while others (e.g. certain resonant frequencies) had to be punched out (literally, I used very narrow EQ bands to poke out certain frequencies).

(Yeah, two instances of Parametric EQ, because there were just not enough knobs for everything I wanted to do)

I’m actually really really happy with how much I was able to match it up with my recording, despite taking it in a dead-end direction for half a day (and having to start over from an older version of the project). The effect stack is #MusicCrimes though:

Having the vocal parts slightly stereo panned also made way for me to make a visualiser video with Marin and Cielo on the correct side of the screen. So, this does bring up the small issue that I’m losing hearing in my right ear, meaning I was constantly flipping the left/right channels as I worked on it, and till now I still second guess whether the audio is properly balanced…another quirk of the production making its way into the song’s final form, I guess.

In the course of putting the track together, I also made an a capella version for fun. It’s not as refined (I tuned down the instrumental to match the slightly off-key singing lol), but I was going for the rough choral feel, so it probably works. But it’s a bit weird playing the OG song and this version one after another, because of the slight detune.

Aaaand that’s become a 1000 word essay. Circlejourney OUT