💌 Liner Notes: Earthquake Room

An insight into how the song was made, from first demo to final product.

Welcome to Liner Notes! The insight into each song on my debut album, Typical Forever. Liner Notes shows the story behind making these songs, the stories that couldn’t fit in a CD booklet or a Bandcamp credits section.

🏛️ Earthquake Room

I know it’s been a long time coming… ‘Earthquake Room’ is the very first single off of my long-awaited debut album, a concept album about geology (oh yeah baby!), called Typical Forever. It tells the story of a first date in a museum, and centers around the (very real) earthquake simulator that you can find in London’s Natural History Museum.

It dropped last week on all music platforms, so if you haven’t had a listen yet, go hit play and use it as the background for reading this email.

Despite being the first song that I’m releasing, it was actually one of the last songs I wrote for the album. And the way I wrote it was quite different from how I’d written the others…

🌱 How Did It Start?

I pretty much wrote this whole album on Substack. What do I mean by that? In 2022 I started this newsletter to explore geology and the ways in which it connected to human experiences. I wrote essays about nostalgia, volcanoes, floods and self-confidence, and through those explorations, I found tidbits of ideas and lyrics which then became full-blown songs. Quite often I’d send out demos along with these essays.

But Earthquake Room was different.

My friend James (who released a brilliant album a month or so ago called Grieftopia) and I went through a period where we wrote a song a week and shared it with each other. Anyone who wants to up their songwriting game, this is a great way to do it. We were half-following

Phil Elverum

’s School of Song course, but this one week we went off-track.

James came up with these parameters:

1. Write a song using an instrument you don’t normally write on.

2. Include at least one line which is funny.

I write a lot on acoustic guitar, it’s my go-to instrument. Sometimes I write on piano, sometimes I write just by singing and seeing what happens. After getting something I’m mostly happy with, I then record a version on my voice memo app in my phone.

With this song, I decided to write and record directly into my computer and work on the project there. And instead of using a guitar, I used my Casio keyboard.

Writing this way, I became more focused on the track being made of different sounds, working together. Like those pieces of art or optical illusions which place objects in different positions so that when you look at them from a certain angle, it makes a picture. Normally when I write, I try to write the picture in one go, as it were, using just one instrument.

✏️ Writing The Song

I started by looking for some drums to write over, because it always adds so much energy and fun when you have a beat to set your song to, and often influences the writing. When I look for drums on Youtube I normally type in the pace I want (120bpm) and the style (funk drum loop) and you can usually find someone playing that for a good five minutes. I think for this one I just googled ‘90s drum loop.’ These drums I ripped off Youtube weren’t used in the final track (otherwise Jim would be coming for his royalties!!!), but they were a good starting point for a demo.

I then started to build some sounds from the Casio. Just bits and pieces, nothing which was going to dominate the track. I liked this wee-oo-wee-oo-wee-oo sound I got with a pitch bend, and created distinct sections for each change in the song (from verse to chorus to bridge) by changing the tones on the keyboard.

Here’s a listen to the demo without voice or drums on it (you might have to turn your volume up a smidge, since it’s not compressed):

As I was doing this, I was also thinking about lyrics. Don’t ask me, “what comes first, music or lyrics?” Quite often, they come like two racehorses competing for a photo finish, overtaking each other every so often during the writing process.

Something which has become a staple now in my songwriting process is free-writing. I do at least a page to get the juices flowing, and quite often I write a whole page before I get that one line which sets everything off. That was the case with ‘Earthquake Room’.

I didn’t set out to write another geology song, I was just having fun. Instead, I was reminiscing about someone I had gone on a date with, and after that one date I was then dubbed their ‘girlfriend’ and was apparently going to be introduced to the parents. Imminently.

sometimes, only a rover dangerfield emote will do

But we can get into the story later, and how it relates to an, um, [checks notes] earthquake… room?

Here’s some of what I was free-writing:

As you can see, by the end of the page I stumble across the first lines of the song: we met in the history museum.

Here’s where this took me:

For the ‘funny’ line (I mean, it’s hard to write something genuinely funny in a song, right?), I decided to include the word ‘lepidopterology’ (the study of butterflies and moths) because when has there ever been a song that mentions lepidopterology? But you just say ‘moths,’ was the following line which offset the joke (can you call it a joke???).

Amazingly, by the end of a single page I had pretty much written all the lyrics to the song. Voila!

And that is how I wrote ‘Earthquake Room.’

🪩 Listen… Now!

Hoo boy. Now that you have a better understanding of the song, hows about we all listen to ‘Earthquake Room’ together?

✨ Bonus song: if you like this song, you’ll like my first single, ‘When You Walk In,’ which shares a lot of the same energy as ‘Earthquake Room.’

📖 Up Next: The Story Behind The Song

Every song starts with a lived experience. Even if the plot of the song is imaginary, songwriters populate songs with feelings and thoughts that they’ve drawn up from a personal well. Next week I’ll be sharing the experience that I drew upon when writing ‘Earthquake Room’, and why the shaking earthquake simulator seemed like a perfect metaphor.

Missed the previous post? Check out my announcement for ‘Earthquake Room’ last week: 🪄🏛️ OUT TODAY: Earthquake Room

Typical Forever: Album Status

🔓 Single 1:🏛️ Earthquake Room [status: unlocked!]

🔐 Single 2: 🏔️ ▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Single 3: 🌊 ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ ▓▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Single 4: 🗺️ ▓▓▓▓ ▓▓ ▓▓▓▓ [status: in the vault]

🔐 Album: 🌋 Typical Forever [status: 12.5% unlocked]

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• buying my music on Bandcamp

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Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶