"Ocean Sky" - The song and how it came about

©Joel Antunes

"Ocean Sky" is one of the oldest "new" Sestina songs we've had lying around. The intro riff came to me a little before our first band practice with the current line-up, just out of genuine excitement of getting to play with the band again, and we just built the first verse and chorus then and there from a few different available ideas.


However, like with almost all of our tunes, after writing as far as the first chorus, we hit the wall:

"Ok, what part comes next?"

"Umm…I don't know. Definitely not the first verse again."

"Say what?"

(...deafening silence...)

Of course the song got finished eventually, but it took many different versions. Maybe ten or so rehearsal demos of trying on different parts and progressions before we got it to where it is now. And the same goes for the vocals; for quite some time it felt I was coming up with less stuff than I was throwing out, but once I started bringing in words for unfinished melodies things evolved quite naturally.

* * *

So as you can see, our writing is not exactly streamlined. I think one of the reasons why a lot of our stuff seems to have the attention span of a TV-addicted three-year old is probably our pig-headedness in trying to do everything the unconventional way. Often once we get to the phase in writing a song where we could just repeat the first verse and chorus before finishing up - like it's normally done - we just kind of shift gears and forget the first half of the song entirely.


Also, "Ocean Sky" is one of those jerky bastards of ours without a chorus. That's right, no repeated sing-alongs on this one. Actually, there are no repeated parts anywhere in the song - there's just melodies, chord changes and rhythms that are shuffled in the mix and get spat out as different versions during the course of the song.


In classical music, this kind of writing is the norm. In rock music, people tend to shake their heads at us a lot.

* * *

Actually, I have absolutely no idea whether or not this kind of writing makes any sense to you, the listener. This is something I've been struggling to come to grips with for some time now: The song makes complete sense to us, but does it make any sense to you? I can definitely say I've had more than my share of breaking down in tears when listening to this particular tune come together (that's right, I'm a complete sissy), so you could say I'm feeling what we're doing. But does any of this register emotionally to you?




Perhaps you could answer that for us. After all, music is basically about communication, and I'd rather not speak double Dutch.




~ Markus

A film blaring in the background while I was writing this:

Quentin Tarantino - Reservoir Dogs

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