Hello and welcome to ‘Season 2’ of mad music mondays. In the first season, I explored the creative process that led to the release of my single, you should know. To go through that journey, I’d advise starting at episode 1.

In this season of mad music mondays, I’m doing a throwback. To my university days, and the music I wrote during my composition degree. One of my composition teachers once told me never to change what I wrote then; let it be who you were at the time. Therefore, in this season, I will be looking back at who I was, and see if there are any parts of me that I would rather like back. You can find Episode 1 here.

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Episode 2.

This week, I’m looking back at a piece called ‘Dark Side of the Rainbow’, written for piano trio. It’s caption reads, ‘there’s a reason every cloud needs a silver lining’.

This was an emotional piece for me. To be honest, I haven’t listened to it in a couple of years, because it takes me right back to that time.

My grandfather had just died, and although I didn’t realise it at the time, this piece was really about my processing of that.

One of the costs of making music for a longer amount of time, is that it slowly, but surely becomes more about the craft than about the emotion and art of it. Particularly as so many people start making musics as adults, in the quest to go ‘viral’, I often find my ideas are losing any semblance of myself in the temptation to follow the same path.

While I was writing this, I remember sitting and playing with ideas, in a way I haven’t done in a really long time. Now I cannot sit here and pretend that I still like all the ideas I included in this piece. But the point is that I played, and I chose them all for a reason.

So that’s the part of myself I want back – the part that improvises on ideas that come from a strong emotion. Even if it does hurt a bit.

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Jena Ren, 2022