Stoked doesn't even begin to cover it--"The Whole World's Melting" is officially out on all major music platforms, and the Teleport EP will be available August 2! I figured now could be a good time to reflect a little bit on the creation, recording, and overall journey of the song.
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LERdno iTunes: https://apple.co/2GkDaiI
Amazon: https://amzn.to/2LV6cdh
The song came about in a little bit of a non-traditional way. It was my senior of college at Western Connecticut State University, and I was taking an Honor's Thesis course on Climate Change and Civilization. The professor, Dr. Wagener, shared so many documentaries and books with us that got me super fired up about the damage we're doing to our planet. I mean, don't get me wrong, I've always been passionate about preventing climate change, but I was at a fever pitch after each class.
Anyways, for the final thesis project, we were encouraged to get creative and present an art piece, poetry piece, etc. Naturally, I said, "I'm gonna write a song!" and I got to work. Pretty quickly, I ended up with the bones of the song, and somewhere along the lines, the repeated hook of "the whole world's melting" came into play. Believe it or not, that's a piece of the song I hardly remember writing. I do love looking back at my lyric sheets though, and I always get a laugh at some of the line ideas that I skipped over. My personal favorite is that the line "our carbon footprint's growing faster than the population" was nearly "our carbon footprint's bigger than Shaq's" and I mean--I can't.
Another interesting thing is that I was admittedly in a little bit of a musical dry spell when I was writing this song. "Glass House Lover" from Teleport had come about recently, but looking back, I wasn't getting a ton of material. This one just sort of came out of nowhere, and I'll always be thankful for it, because it resparked that musical bug for a while.
Fast forward a year or two, and Billie and I got with our bass-playing buddy Matt Balogh to record the track at NL Studios in West Haven, Connecticut, with our friend Jacob Berberich (you might know him from Mighty Tortuga). We laid down the track, and then got busy. We didn't have a direction, I was planning to release stuff as "Kenny Ward" but with no goals or ideas of what that would look like. We filmed the music video, sat on the raw footage for at least a year, and pretty much stagnated.
Then all of a sudden, something clicked.
Billie and myself decided to work together as a band and soon, The Other Realm was born. We touched up the track with some synth layers to match the sound we were going for and got ready to send the project out to the world. I ended up spontaneously entering a songwriting competition here on Maui, where I live. It was at the Maui Coffee Attic, and truly, I just showed up not expecting much. I played "The Whole World's Melting" and ended up winning, along with my friend Steve Grimes for his song "Honeydew". This landed me a trip to the Hawaii Songwriting Festival on the Big Island, where I entered the song again and made it into first the Top 6, and then the Top 3. I placed third with the track right as Billie and I were getting ready to release some of The Other Realm material, and we decided there was no better introduction than this song. So--there's the story. From an honors classroom in Connecticut to a songwriter's festival in Hawaii, this song has seen a lot of performances and stages, and we're so so so excited to now share it with you!