Never Nervous

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As I have throughout this website, I'm going to keep it real on this.

This song reminds me of like...dance competitions.

it's hype in that way. it's even got the laugh sample built in for confidence.

that laugh sample reminds me of street fighter as well, 

so there's the video game angle again.

At first I wasn't going to develop this song all the way, 

because i felt it sounded too much like I made it in fruityloops.

my engineer friends know the difference between the DAWs 

(digital audio workstations) and can hear the difference almost immediately.

and to be honest, FLstudio (fruityloops to the OGs) has been much maligned over the years

for sounding cheap or thin or disjointed or something. 

so while i was writing all the songs for this audio gallery

(they were all written back to back Jan-Feb 2021)

i came across this song and almost didn't include it

but after working with it i realized and remembered

that it's good to sound like what it is.

as an artist we sometimes hold ourselves to irrelevant comparisons

because of capitalist marginalization

to make a "perfect" "commercial" record....

but that's not what i want to do. 

i want to make art and music which is true to me and my process

and i want to be honest with you about me and my process

because in that honesty, there is real communication and value

to inspire, to contextualize, to understand me, you, and everybody else

i love flstudio and i recommend it to any beginner (the demo is free!) 

as a way to begin expressing your musical ideas. 

it's what i learned on when i was 15. i've made an insane amount of music using this software.

so if you think this song sounds like FLStudio, good. I want it to.

It's who emperor steve is, and that's what matters.

I wanted to name this song never nervous as soon as I heard the chorus 

and got that dance competition vibe i mentioned up top. 

but then i made this art, and i wanted to change it to "bull's eye"

because i was thinking about how weird it is to play darts

and the best thing you can do is hit a circle the size of a bull's eye.

But as I finished the song, I realized that I really wanted to name it towards

that same dance competition vibe, 

and tbh if I were a dancer 

(who might be a little nervous about submitting personal artistic expression to be judged)

i would want to select a song that had confidence built in. 

that logic is why i went with "never nervous" over "bull's eye"

we'll probably see bull's eye come out as a completely different song about animal cruelty in the future

but no plans as i write this

unless this counts as a plan

dammit

The texture in the middle is actually a photograph of my own eye, layered in.

The structure was one of my many middle-of-the-night visions that turned into something.