The Light Inside

At the end of September, I released a song called The Light Inside. It’s a collaboration with my friends Eddie Lehwald and Rebecca Rivera (aka Rebz River). We released it under the artist name We Just Met. 

I’ve been curious about writing in different styles and developing my songwriting skills beyond structures I default to from the sketch and improv scene. I love writing comedy songs but I also enjoy exploring different genres and working with different artists. 

The past two years I’ve attended the What Up Pitches Sync fiesta, a two day music conference in Chicago.  It’s a small conference that focuses on the sync side of the music industry. 

So if you don’t know what sync is, here’s the deal. When you see music on film it’s either composed for a film or it’s an existing track that is licensed for use. Sync= synchronization licenses.  The way one gets a sync license is a whole rabbit hole that I am still learning about but it basically it involves getting your music placed in libraries with sync agents who then pitch your song to film and commercial clients. It’s a complex layer cake of gatekeepers and therefore having a whole conference about this specific part of the industry is A THING. What Up Pitches is a women-led sync agency that hosts the conference. 

My favorite part of the conference is the second day is an all day co-write session. You show up Saturday morning, coffee in hand and get assigned to a group of people, and then spend all day writing a song with them. You are given prompts for songs the sync agency might want in their library and members of WUP come in to give you feedback on the song. At the end of the two weeks you can submit the song to What Up Pitches and they let you know if they can use it in their library. Either way, you have a cool song that you can do what you want with afterwards. 

 I came into this year’s co-write knowing that I wanted to experiment with some sort of epic cinematic pop sort of style. I also went in knowing that I wanted to bring another producer into the team.

 I met my friend Eddie through the Produce Like a Boss program, an online course I’ve been a part of the past few years. He had posted in the PLAB facebook group that he had just moved to Chicago. We met up for coffee talked about production for an hour then realized we both love survivor and talked about that. The all day cowrite was an opportunity for us to write together. We also had the advantage of living near the conference so we combined equiptment from our home studios so we could set up our little studio at co-writing session  

Eddie and I with our combined production station 

On the morning of the co-write, Rebecca Rivera aka Rebz River sat down at our table and was chatting with another friend of ours about how she wanted to work with more female producers. I jumped into the conversation and was like “it is I female producer” and we became friends. 

The three of us got put together in a group and went up to a practice room to write. The prompt we chose was to write a song with dynamic emotional moments building to a crescendo with sudden quiet ending. Our reference track was Animal by Mlk https://youtu.be/RKvwsY7Xcsk?si=C9awaRPHqSfwZBs_

Years ago I had written a song with the chorus “the light was here the whole time” and I went into our writing session knowing I wanted to revisit that lyric. I played around with some moody chords, Rebz and I went back and forth on the lyrics while Eddie set up the track and we flowed from there. 

a mid session selfie

Cecilia from What Up Pitches came by and gave us feedback on the song, resulting in moving around our verses. We got a really good draft down and then met up at Eddie’s home studio the next week to finish it off. 

Listening thru the mix in progress. I have zero chill. 

Previously, when I’d done co-writes for sync, I got caught up in the possibilities of where the song could go. This added a lot of stress to the process for me and I felt overwhelmed.  It was nice to go into this session and just write a song and make something cool with friends that we can pitch around. It was also cool to experiment in another genre. I like what I do as a comedy songwriter but it’s really cool to write with and for people who have different voices than I do and can really nail these different styles. So that’s definitely something I”m interested in doing more of. 

Anyway, you can give the song a spin wherever you listen to music. You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your music.
Let me know what you think and if you put it on a playlist, definitely let me know!