Nothing Written Down, One Take, No Shoes

as featured in the University of Auckland's student Magazine, Craccum, 2025 Issue 4: Music Edition.

Stage 1: Songwriting

Task: Retrieve a Song From the Ether and Don’t Let Your Mind Get in The Way

To me, music is a precious and crucial element of human life that transcends language and time, and songwriting is a bridge between the human experience and the divine. 

The veil is most thin when I am alone and weary, typically late at night when I should be asleep, or at least always when I probably ‘should’ be doing something else. All my best songs arise when I can seize that small pocket of time, ignore disruptions, and quietly, without judgement or constraint, tune into whatever emotion is overcoming me and allow it to pour out.

I want to emphasise the importance of that absence of judgement or constraint: I have noticed so clearly how if (and when) I attend to my songwriting with too much of a critical, logical mind, or especially a mind that worries what others might think, the spell is immediately broken and the song vanishes from my grasp. You must not allow anyone’s judgement - even your own - to impede this vulnerable, valuable process, at least not until long after the initial birth of the song. If you must capture the songwriting process, my best advice is to set up a voice memo recording at the beginning of your session and place your device away from you.

Along this same vein, I try not to constrain my early songs to the confines of pen and paper until much later. For me, recording exact lyrics or annotating specific chords is not nearly as crucial as enabling the flow. Anything that impedes your presence and takes you into a more logical state can break the spell: do not allow that. 

When I am asked how long it took me to write the songs on my new album, I have been answering in months. Although the initial outpouring is typically less than an hour, my process continues long-term. For months, I play my songs repeatedly until they solidify themselves. The lyrics that sit best in my mouth and in my memory are retained, and the key emotions become refined; through repetition and time, the songs become familiar, cohesive snapshots of whatever I captured in the initial songwriting process.

(Adrianne Lenker, one of my biggest musical inspirations, shares a kindred approach to the creative flow in an interview with ‘Songwriters On Process’: https://www.songwritersonprocess.com/blog/2017/8/8/adrianne-lenker-big-thief)

Adrianne Lenker, my greatest musical inspiration as of late

Perhaps this is all sounding somewhat wishy-washy to you, dear reader, but it's true: songwriting is a highly spiritual experience for me. I would even argue that it is a spiritual practice - one of presence, patience, and deep inner reflection. However, some more grounded elements are key to a consistent song-birthing practice. It has been very interesting to me to discover the importance of structure to creativity. They seem oppositional in my mind: structure as oppressive, controlling, rigid, and creativity as untamed, impulsive, flowing. Nonetheless, I’ve come to realise the importance of structure as a container for creative expression: without it, these pockets of free-flowing inspiration are too easily lost in the noise of life. I believe it is crucial to utilise structure to carve out space for creativity: to create space in your schedule so that you have time to confront the boredom/stillness/chaos that enables creativity, where emotions and music and the divine are free to reveal themselves to you. 

Stage 2: Recording

Task: Compelling Capture an Emotional Essence

After about a year of writing the songs that comprise my most recent album, I first recorded the ‘bones’ of the songs (as I wrote them alone - just me and my guitar). Many of the lead vocal takes in the final album are one solid take. I personally prioritise authentic, emotional performance over exact precision and vocal perfection, so my recording sessions typically involve running through the song many times and later choosing the most compelling take. 

I am quite comfortable with recording studios; however, the necessary sterility of these spaces can sometimes present obstacles to recording vocals with genuine and convincing emotional value behind them. It can be difficult for me to suddenly jump into my song and truly tune into the deep emotions behind it, but the take only becomes something worth keeping when I can - that’s where the real magic is.

My best little solutions are:

• turning off the big light

• taking off my shoes

• and trying to remain in a tender headspace during an entire recording session, despite their logical and technical nature.

In this vein, in the pursuit of compelling vocal performance, I highly recommend the book ‘The Performer’s Voice’ by Meribeth Bunch Dayme, which I first found in our very own [University of Auckland's] General Library. I was very inspired by the holistic approach to singing explored in this book, and I utilised many of its methods while recording this album’s vocals. One technique that particularly stuck with me is imagining oneself as a point inside a circle, where your voice emanates from a grounded centre and radiates out through the space all around you.

Highly reccommended :)

Stage 3: Production

Task: World-Building with Bravery and Honesty

The next phase of development began nearly a year after I recorded the ‘bones’ of my precious songs. It was important for me to wait for the right collaborator. The process of collaborative production requires a degree of bravery for me. To entrust another individual with developing my vulnerable songs is scary - it feels like handing over a piece of my soul. I think it requires a high degree of genuine compatibility - creatively as well as on a personal level. 

Luckily, I worked with the wonderful Harry Charles Leatherby to produce this latest album. From the start, I felt comfortable enough with Harry to be specific and demanding about the vision I had for the sound. Simultaneously, he was able to truly understand my brave expressions of my creative ideas and bring them into reality without judgement or mistranslation. 

In the stu with Harry Charles Leatherby :)

I see production as a world-building process, building up the emotional and sonic landscape to realise the full capacity of my songs. For Of Water, we aimed for a sort of haunted sonic world full of ghostly textures and dreamy swells, with danger and darkness trembling beneath the delicate surface. We worked for 5 months across the summer, fleshing out the songs with many guitar layers, vocal harmonies, atmospheric electronic ambience, and driving percussion. It is so exciting to see the songs come to life - with new life breathed into them by a trusted collaborator, years after their initial creation.

Now that I have completed the music side of the album, the next three months before release are all about the marketing side of it all, which, honestly, I have far less enthusiasm for, and far less wisdom worth sharing about.

Ultimately, the process of creating an album from beginning to end is vulnerable, tedious, and requires the best of your emotional, spiritual, and technical skills. But I do find it so fulfilling: it is a piece of my heart, captured and shared through the wondrous and awe-inspiringly impactful medium of Music.

‘Of Water’ , freya's debut studio album, coming July 2025.