MIDDLES - How I Started Songwriting
Hey there! This is Olivia, one of the two percussionists in FLYDLPHN. Today I wanted to share a little bit about my work as a singer/songwriter and producer, and tell you a bit about how I started writing my own songs.
The cluster of musical projects that I’m a part of is closely tied to my personality - I have ADHD so I love to be involved in a million things at the same time, get easily excited about starting new things and dreaming up cool ideas with my friends, often over-ambitiously so. I do a lot of diverse, cross-genre and collaborative work, and in addition to being a percussionist, I’ve been writing and producing my own music for the past 4 years.
I have no formal composition training, but I grew up writing songs and short stories. When I was four, I wrote a little rhyming story called “Knock Knock under the Dock.” Throughout elementary school, I had multiple “bands” through which I wrote many songs… most of them pretty mediocre, but it was really great practice at lyric writing. Looking back, I was extraordinarily particular about these songs. I was not an easy person to write with and I was very stubborn. My grandma likes to say it’s because I’m a Taurus. Little eight year old me was very, very adamant about rhyme and structure and, surprisingly, had a very good understanding of stressed syllables and how that affected lyric flow. I knew what I wanted and I was not shy about it.
Fast forward to middle school, when I started taking guitar lessons and I had been in band class for a few years. With a little more interesting musical vocabulary at my hands, I started writing songs with the accompaniment of my guitar. When I was thirteen I was listening to My Chemical Romance and writing angsty songs, and thankfully, I had some extremely potent pubescent emotions to draw from. In early high school, I started listening to Amy Winehouse, and she became a huge inspiration for my harmonic content, lyric writing and overall style. Because I didn’t have any music production experience at the time, I kind of accepted that these songs would never be recorded and released, and I didn’t have a live band to perform them with, so the extent of sharing these songs was through shitty iPhone videos that I sent to a few close friends.
Then after a year or two into high school, I stopped writing songs for a while. As the years of high school passed by, and I decided to pursue percussion professionally, I became more convinced that songwriting was not a worthwhile use of my time, and not something I could be successful at. A large part of my heart existed in songwriting, but my philosophy regarding my musical ambitions was much more one-dimensional then - I didn’t see the value in writing my trivial little songs when I needed to focus on my skills as a percussionist. Not to mention, I was embarrassed about my songwriting at the time.
Thankfully, my lovely friends at UMich reminded me what it feels like to write music without the need to justify it. In my sophomore year of college, I took an electronic music class taught by my dear friend Chris Sies, in which I learned how to record and produce my own music, and the creativity was back at my fingertips. Around this time, having had more exposure to ambient, minimalist and textural percussion repertoire as well as listening to electronic music producers like Shigeto and Noga Erez, I started exploring what it meant to combine all of these aesthetics with my songwriting experience. After a lot of encouragement from friends after tentatively sharing some of my tracks, initially only intended to be private and precious passion projects, I then released my first EP, guilt trip joy ride, in 2022.
Since then I’ve grown increasingly involved in projects and collaborations where I put on the amorphous performer/composer/producer/songwriter hat. After my EP was released, Fitz and I started writing music together through our duo VIRID. This has been really insightful, as Fitz has studied composition for 6 years at UMich and has a very different approach and method than myself. As I’ve worked on more collaborative compositions with friends and colleagues for the past couple years, I’ve learned a lot about myself, my weaknesses, my strengths and tendencies and my boundaries, and my music has taken many different shapes and forms.
In November, I released my first full solo album, titled MIDDLES. It’s a colorful album of 6 tracks that I wrote and produced between 2022 and 2024. Each track is pretty distinct, but a lot of my inspirations have come from ambient artists and modular synth players as well as avant-pop songwriter/producers. Myinfluences writing this album come from a looooong list, including but not limited to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Sofie Birch, Saya Gray, Radiohead, Remi Wolf, St. Vincent, Kalbells, Caroline Polachek, Floating Points, Arp, Animal Collective, MARO, and many others. I don’t know if you actually can hear any of that in there… but I like to think that the folks I admire the most show up in the album somewhere.
I’m very proud of it, and I hope you like it :)
MIDDLES | Olivia Cirisan
Released November 2, 2024
