More Than Just A Friend

Early Recordings of “More Than Just A Friend”

More Than Just A Friend

Verse 1

I’m waking up at 6 am

Still thinking ‘bout all that you said

Thoughts of you circling all around my mind

Hearts racing every time

Pre-chorus

Cause one smile and you caught me with that glance

All your spells oh you got me in a trance

You’re so perfect, should I take a chance

And risk it all

Chorus

Tell me what I really mean to you

‘Cause I’m fallin’ so tell me are you fallin’ too

Can it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Tell me why is it so damn hard to read the signs

Swear it all feels so wrong even when it’s right

Can it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Verse 2

Oh can you just tell me the truth

Am I anything to you

Don’t wanna play any games that’ll drive me insane

So what should I do

Pre-chorus

Cause don’t want to lose you as a friend

But this tension’s getting to my head

So just tell me what is the next step

For the two of us

Chorus

Tell me what I really mean to you

‘Cause I’m fallin’ so tell me are you fallin’ too

Can it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Tell me why is it so damn hard to read the signs

Swear it all feels so wrong even when it’s right

Can it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Can I be something more to you than just a friend

Bridge

Yeah I don’t want to waste my time

If in the end you won’t be mine

Cause either way I’d be fine

If I knew the truth

Yeah I don’t want to waste my time

If in the end you won’t be mine

Cause either way I’d be fine

What do I mean to you?

Chorus

Oh tell me what I really mean to you

‘Cause I’m fallin’ so tell me are you fallin’ too

Can it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Tell me why is it so damn hard to read the signs

Swear it all feels so wrong even when it’s right

Will it be you and I together in the end

Or am I nothing more to you than just a friend

Can I be something more to you than just a friend

Can I be more to you than just a friend

Weekly Recording Process of More Than Just A Friend

12/9

I just found the files for More Than Just A Friend! I was going to record More Than Just A Friend as my second song for this project but I couldn’t find the files for the song. I had to make a copy of the song’s project so that I could experiment on tracks without screwing up my original project, but I ended up losing my original project. Turns out it was hidden deep in my other song project’s under a different name than I expected. I’ve looked through my old song progress and I think it’s going to need a lot of changes, but I’m excited to see how the recording turns out!

12/10-12/16

I’m already pretty far into the song. The work this week was mostly easy since I had a lot of pre-existing progress. Basically all the instrumental tracks were complete and I just needed to weed through them to find which synth and pad melodies I wanted. I had too many instrument sounds and they were making the recording cloudy, so I deleted the unnecessary ones. I’ve recorded some vocals and I made a big change to them. I decided that singing the lyrics in a low tone was too dull, so I shifted up the melodies to a higher octave. The high octave was extremely hard to sing because of how high it was, but it definitely added more energy to the song. It’s been nice to record a happier song for once. I’m looking forward to finishing this song.

12/17-12/24

I recorded all the lyrics this week which took a while because of all the voice cracks. I had to do so much splicing just to get a clean vocal recording. The two prechoruses were particularly difficult because that is where I have to sing the highest for the song. I felt like I was practically screaming, but I will admit it was fun. The bridge vocal section also took me a while to record. I was never satisfied with how it sounded and I went back to re-record it multiple times. I’m still not completely happy with how the bridge sounds but for now it’s good enough. Next week, I’ll add some finishing touches and mix the song.

12/24-1/4

More Than Just A Friend is complete now. I went back to the bridge section, and instead of re-recording the vocal track, I just added a part where I sang the bridge part in the lower octave. The bridge sounds so good now. For the ending of the song, I decided to go with a sort of instant cut off after the third chorus which sounds really cool. It gives the song a pop-like feel which fits the overall mood of the song well. The biggest change to the song was probably that I went back and layered both verse sections. I never meant for the verses vocal tracks to be doubled. When I was playing the song for my music teacher, I accidentally played the main vocal track with an un-used vocal track and it sounded pretty cool. Originally I only meant to have the main vocal track, but since the accidental doubling sounded good, I kept it. I finished the song my mixing and adjusting volume levels, automating certain sections of the song, and panning layered tracks. I’m glad I made the adjustment to sing the song in a higher octave and I like how everything turned out. I’m also just glad that I was able to find this lost song project and finally finish it.

Story of More Than Just A Friend

More Than Just A Friend originated from a digital drum beat I created after a band meeting with my high school friends. School had just come to a close and we had a band meeting just to jam together and try to create something. We were unsuccesful but agreed that we wanted to create more originals songs in the future, so I tried to kickstart some ideas for a band song on my own. This led me to create the drum beat, and from there, I went on to also find some chord progressions on the guitar that would fit this song. I named the project file “Band Song #1,” since I thought this song would be for the band, and I used a fast drum beat so that the band song would have more energy than my traditonal music which was super gloomy and depressing. However, as I created more instrumental parts, the song slowly shifted away from being for the band and more towards being my first recorded song as a solo artist. I really wanted to have at least one of my songs recorded, so I worked tirelessly on recording all the instrumental tracks. I ended up completing all the instrumental parts, but I still needed to write some lyrics. My usual process for writing lyrics involves getting lyrics in my head first and then creating an instrumental part, however in this case, things were different and I just wrote whatever lyrics came to my mind. And on my mind at the time was the question of whether or not this girl that I had feelings for felt the same way about me. The lyrical inspiration came from my experiences of repeatedly “waking up at 6am” thinking about her and wondering if I was “nothing more to [her] than just a friend.” I know the lyrics are super cheesy, but I think that just adds a level of lightheartedness to the song. I find that I actually really enjoy listening to “More Than Just A Friend,” just because it is so different from my other music and that the lyrics are so bad that they are good.