Coming up with the 'DODGE' Concept

A couple of nights ago we came up with, and recorded the scratch vocals for my new project which is now called "DODGE". Carissa and Zac had the MIDI Studio booked to record some final backing vocals of their own project, and I joined in on the end of this so that Carissa was also there to help out with coming up with some of the lyrics.

I had previously given Zac some ideas of what to write about based on what I learnt when listening to the lyrics of my track teardown. After listening to some other songs that I was using for inspiration I found a common theme of escapism in all of the lyrics, concepts such as getting away and breaking free from society. After doing some vocal warmups in the studio (as well as recording the last parts of Zac's project with Carissa), we listened through the track, put it into a Logic session (first time using logic) and started marking out where I had ideas for each section, such as where I had structured the song to have its first verse, chorus etc. We then skipped to the chorus to get the main idea for the hook of the song as this was something Zac wanted to make first and then build the other parts of the song around this.

We discussed the 80's influence in the song and the level at which the 80's style Toms were at, Zac and I agreed that I should make them loud as we should either intentionally do it in an 80's style as half doing it only had half the effect.

When writing his lyrical melody, Zac recorded a voice memo with his iPhone in case any ideas were forgotten later, the melody of the chorus was quickly thought of, however I suggested that we added some more rhythm to it as it would fit the vibe of the song, and this started to form as lyrics started to come in. Then the line "I try to dodge myself" came up, which worked really well with the song. It essentially means he tries to get away from himself inside of his head. While having a thesaurus open, we (Zac, Carissa and I) started coming up with the rest of the lyrics, one that I particularly felt fit the vibe was the line "It's confining me", as this linked back to the idea of escapism that I had mentioned earlier.

Zac then thought of the idea of calling the song "Dodge" and then linking this to Dodge as in the brand of car later in the song. I loved this idea as it really fit the 80's style summer vibe that was present in the song.

The next line which I suggested was "I'm leaving you on read", referring to the 'read' notification that appears when someone reads your message but doesn't reply to it. I actually suggested as a joke but then ended up making the cut due to the like light-hearted fun nature of it, and how it fits the fun sound of the song. It also adds a bit of a modern touch, which is a nice contrast of the 80's style we were going for.

We then started writing the first and second verse, which we had pretty much the same process for.

After we had an idea of how the song would sound and how the chorus sounded, we kept some of these lyrics to workshop and then record the final version with.

Zac and I booked the studio for a couple of days later to record the final version of the track and then I can go from there onto the mixing stages.

Thanks for listening!