Response: Breathing Tomorrow type √:arietta

Sunrise Roadshow Era (#02.5)
April 24th, 2021

I originally wrote Breathing Tomorrow on March 13th, 2020. I very specifically remember that day — for me at the very least, it was the day that the world changed as we knew it. I was finishing my remaining weeks of college, enjoying my day-to-day life, but a looming sense of eeriness was upon me in fear that a recent virus outbreak might make its way overseas. I never thought it was the end of the world — far from it — but I've never seen anybody so panicked and preparing for it as much as I was suddenly witnessing.

That day, after my month-old fears came true, I went home and breathed. Instead of worrying, fearing that maybe the world as we knew it could be over, I decided to lay down with my guitar for an hour and improvise some chords. I was still very amateur at playing guitar back in early 2020 — not that I’m all that much better now — so I didn’t know a large range of chord shapes to improvise and mend. I was mostly familiar with open chords, though I spent a lot of the summer in 2019 making my way into playing barre chords.

In that hour, I came up with a chord progression that I instinctively first play when I pick up a guitar now — the chord progression of Breathing Tomorrow.

At that moment, I changed the course of my music forever. Genuinely — Breathing Tomorrow, for the first time ever, was my most well-received single at the time as World’s Last Garden; it still is now. In a year’s time, it has garnered over 9,000 plays (exactly 9,272 on SoundCloud as I’m writing this), easily surpassing every other upload on my profile — even Connections, which had its own fair share of contribution to the reception of World’s Last Garden.

However, when I released Breathing Tomorrow originally, I had only worked on it for around 15 to 20 hours maximum. That’s still a lot more than most songs I’ve released (the lowest being 1 hour and 20 minutes for Crystalline), but to put it into perspective: Breathing Tomorrow type √:arietta has over 40 hours of work time on it alone, not including the many, many hours I spent recording countless unsatisfactory vocals for the final release.

This version of Breathing Tomorrow — which there may be an acoustic version in the future — is what I consider the definitive edition. The final mix is much more familiar to Morning Flower’s final release, the high end is much less blasted, there is a faithful balance of instruments and inclusion of snares (which the original did not have), and the list goes on.

I was scared to release this — and I’m writing this 5 hours before it goes live (I haven’t slept) — Sunrise Roadshow has practically been sabotaged for quicker releases overall. As I stated earlier (November? December?) on Twitter, SRS 03 was going to be one of most emotionally heavy songs in the series, vocally. The issue was that I was trying to record it every few days and never ended up with a result I could be pleased with — and as a result I often started breaking down because I believed I wasn’t able to release music anymore. My voice has become a core element of the World’s Last Garden style — even though I’m very much not a great singer whatsoever — so to not be able to record vocals I’m satisfied with regularly is a huge stab in the lungs.

Even right now, at 6:56am on the day of release, I don’t think the vocals are good enough. But eventually, I had to look myself in the face and say, “Shove it.” If I don’t release this on today of all days, one year after the debut of Sunrise Roadshow, it would never get released. And to make matters worse, I probably wouldn’t release anything else. If I kept going down this path of postponing out of fear over my voice, at what point would I just stop releasing altogether?

So here I am, awake the day of without getting any sleep, writing an essay about everything leading up to this song.

I want you to know I genuinely care about every release. Even though BTa is basically just Breathing Tomorrow version 2, I’m treating it like it’s a completely new song. Since the beginning of releasing original music, I’ve stayed up countless nights for launches. On the day of Connections — July 7th, 2019 — I stayed up without sleep much like today. Both out of excitement, but out of fear. I want everything to go well every launch — every tweet much launch on time, every Discord message must be sent on time, the SoundCloud release needs to go up at the exact second I planned the release for — and it’s been like that for nearly every release I’ve done.

If nothing else, my willingness to honor the times I set for song releases is one I respect, as someone who has been having a hard time for years now trying to find aspects of himself to love.

And that loops back around to the meaning of Breathing Tomorrow.

If you didn’t already know, or perhaps it wasn’t too clear, Breathing Tomorrow is based purely on my struggles of making music.

I’ve been making music for 10 years now, and nearly every year since, music has become more and more of a struggle as I began to make more complex music with more complex production. As a result, as far back as when I was 15, I was struggling to fight the feeling of always feeling like I’ve never accomplished anything. Seeing others succeed easier, others making much better music than my own, not being able to directly see my goals to fruition — especially at a young age — all resulted in depression for a lot of my teenagerhood, which extended into my adulthood.

Whether it be for myself or everyone else with similar struggles, I wrote this song about those feelings. I believe a lot of people go through them too, so instead of writing the song from directly my perspective, I wanted it to be told from the perspective of the listener’s older, matured self. I think that the idea of your future self visiting you and assuring to you that you’ll be okay is a very comforting thought. Even if the person listening doesn’t see comfort in that, they may similarly seek comfort in being told by someone else with similar experiences that they’ll be okay after everything they’ve been through.

My final point —

The amazing thing about Breathing Tomorrow is that even though I wrote it, and I have my own intentions through the lyrics as the author, there is hundreds of interpretations for this song. In the year that it’s been out, I’ve heard many, many perspectives on how BT has helped them and how what they felt through the lyrics lead them to that. Still, to this day, it’s such a crazy thought to wrap my head around — the thought of someone’s life being bettered by a song I wrote about my own experiences — and I hope the music I continue to release keeps helping people in the same way.

Seeing others happy through something I’ve contributed to or made is an amazing feeling. If nothing else makes you happy when creating, know that there is someone out there whose life has or will change after coming across your efforts.

Thank you for reading this far. It’s early in the morning, everything is prepared for release (except for Spotify and all those platforms), so I think it's high time I took a nap. I'm sleepy.

I love you all, and I hope you look forward to the rest of Sunrise Roadshow.

- Caiden

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lyrics

—

have ten years really been hard?
did you understand the suffering?
i know how hard it was to think
for yourself and for your own

we all make mistakes, but you've gotta move on
you don't have to prove yourself to anyone
have a little faith, in yourself, in your love,
so tomorrow you can breathe, you'll see

time and time again, you can't breathe in
with hope in your eyes, just jump to the skies
and catch your fading certainty
your voice has changed, you sing the same,
did everything you've been through finally get at you?

hear me out, "it's okay,"
the stars watch over you every passing day
i know it's been hard, you were dealt the wrong cards
you'll get through, i promise
after all we share the same mind and a heart
even if we're worlds apart

we all make mistakes, but time will move on
we'll get there together, we're birds of a feather
have a little faith, in your world, and in mine,
so tomorrow, they can breathe, they'll see

"why spend your life alone if you can find love in all your own?"