The Night in the Woods medley

Like a story that your friend wrote - got a loving attitude..

This project started in August 2018.

Through these six years and nine months, there have been a lot of sweat and tears - both tears of joy and tears of despair - enormous amounts of stress, intense moments of gratitude and relief as a new box on the long checklist was checked, and above all: Joy of creation.

What you're about to hear is a little more than 20 minutes of music from the game "Night in the Woods". David plays the piano and other digital instruments, and I sing (and go all in on weighing up for lack of experience with intense conveyance of emotion). And the lyrics? I wrote them, but I've borrowed as much as I could from the game's dialogue - on the other hand, I had to come up with some parts myself in order to make it fit the all in all 20 melodies. Oh, and to make it rhyme..

So, what are the lyrics about? They're about 20 year old Mae, who's grown up the American rust belt, and who finds herself forced to quit her newly started college education and return to the godforsaken small town of Possum Springs. What can you live for, when your future gets taken away from you by forces beyond your control? How can you find hope at all, when the center of your reality is about to disappear? Where can hope come from, when everything around you ends, falls apart, and no longer feels alive?

Yep, that was my attempt to include you, a person who's never played "Night in the Woods", in the experience. And that includes as far as I know 99 % of the people I'm sending this link to! I believe a little context is needed, because the audience I had in mind when outlining the project was a person who hasn't just played the game, but who's as huge a fan of it as I am. So it's fully possible that despite my above attempt, you'll feel excluded when you watch the video below. Or just feel embarrassed to hear me hurl out singing with such an intensity as the one I'm going for here, without understanding "what the deal is, really" - a deal that has made me want to publish a public recording of me screaming, bellowing, deliberately singing off key (and also involuntarily!), snarling, pretending to be choking up, and at one point, trying to sound like a 14 year old who just discovered metal. It's completely all right if you tell me you didn't like it! But thank you being here and giving it a try <3

So, without further defense - Vegard and David present:

"Through the Space Between the Stars"

- Vegard

PS.: For those of you who might be extra curious, there's some more about the long creation process below!

So, that was it! What do you think?

The process of creating this beast was maybe more "the point of it all" than the actual result. David and I have had a great excuse to meet regularly, and despite it being me who were excited about the idea that started it all, the joy of creation has come from both creators!

The fact that David got a lot out of being part of this makes me feel happy and relieved - because he's really put in a giant effort here. To ask anyone, no matter how good friends you are with that person, to make more that 20 minutes of music, based on a game that person hasn't even played, is a monumental favor to ask for. That's why I was so nervous when I came to him one day, and played a rough recording of the idea for him, and told him that his role in the project was to be making the instrumental track, and then mix the sound after I'd recorded the vocals. And since David is the best ever, he said yes - though with one condition: That we settled with "good enough" during the process, otherwise it would take far too long. He knew how much of a perfectionist we both can be, he knew, with his experience with music production, how much work it'd be, so it was a very sensible condition. And, well, as you can tell from the fact that it took all the way until 2025 before we were done, neither David nor I were able to keep ourselves from working way harder for this medley than merely making it "good enough".

But why? For me, of the reasons was how intense the inspiration had been in the first place. When I played the game, it was exactly what I needed at that exact moment. I wasn't in a good state in 2018. At the same time, I'd won a lot of battles against my depression, and I spent a lot of time looking back, processing all the years of even deeper dark that I'd put behind me. That's why the game's message about celebrating the things and the people who make up your inner sense of home, and find your way out of hopelessness with them, became an important step in my process. And right after I'd finished playing it, inspiration struck me like a bolt of lightning. It was an exhilarating sensation, mixed with awe.

The composer behind the music, Alec Holowka, was a master of melodies. To me, truly great melodies are singable, follow a dramatic arch, and are preferably full of references to earlier parts (in bigger compositions), and Alec had created an entire soundtrack of nothing but melodies like that. All the references made it feel natural to put them together in a medley, and something else the melodies were practically begging for, was for someone to set lyrics to them! It's even a mechanic of the game that some of the songs are played because the characters perform them in a band, but because there's no voice acting in the game, you just see the lyrics and the screen and hear the music. I longed to sing them, and to tie the music more directly to the emotional experience I'd had from the game's script, by adapting the script to the tunes that didn't have lyrics already.

And as I sat there making my plan for how it all fit together, and wrote my own lyrics where I had to, the ideas came barreling into my head one after another: Here's the red tread, we have to separate the story into parts. At the end, I lose it and sound like I'm having a breakdown, here, the tempo slows down, here, it speeds up and transitions to a more hopeful version of the same melody, here, I go down an octave and snarl like a dog, here, I'm meek and about to break down. So when David and I started making the instrumental track in October 2018, it was hard, to put it mildly, to keep my requests to David realistic and possible to deliver on within a sensible time frame, with just an electric piano and some digital adjustments.

The communication process here was a study in psychology all onto itself. Since I'm practically devoid of any knowledge of music theory, all I could provide when David asked me what I wanted for the next song in line, was a feeling. And it was equally magical every time he was able to pull music out of my vague descriptions of emotions and abstract thoughts, and manifest precisely what I had in mind! But the road to get there was laid with a long series of translations: "How about this?" "That's too much party mood and high spirits, I need more campfire." "Hmm, campfire, you say. How about this?" "Yeah, there you go! Can you make it even MORE campfire?"

After seven months, during which we had met pretty regularly and had what we called "medley time", the instrumental track was done in May 2019. Now, it was my turn: I was to sing along to the track, and record all the vocals. I'll say it right away: I had overestimated myself as a singer. I guess it was something I was aware of before, but hadn't quite admitted to myself: When I sing, and especially when I record it, I'm afraid of not being good enough. In my improvised recording booths consisting of blankets hung up on closets and the like, I've sweated, screamed, cursed and had so high stress levels that I did nothing but self-sabotage. And all the expectations I had for the specific emotional expressions I wanted did not make things better: Not only was I supposed to sing the songs well, but also to have the right emotion while doing so! The ideal singer for this probably would have been a professional singer with stage experience on top (and preferably an American, like Mae is!).

I wish I could say that the recording process, which when we include a long hiatus lasting more than half a year lasted over two years, let me learn to master my voice, but regrettably, I'm still in an early stage on that front. But what I have learned is to be less ashamed about it, and to call myself what I am: An amateur with ideas that are a lot bigger than my skills. I have a complicated relationship with my self confidence, and ever since the time I started thinking that I might like having singing as a hobby, I've been a terrible mentor for myself. What I was actually doing during those two years of vocal recording was more often whipping myself than properly practicing in order to improve. When I look back on it now, I'm thinking that there's no benefit to getting that angry at myself for not being something I simply am not!

The fact that I, at the end of this phase, decided to come up with and record second voices, too, really was madness: I can't name a single chord, and just made up stuff wildly according to what felt good. And I was floored when David got to hear them, and was actually moved by a couple of them! Especially the intimate song Sharkle Dream, which in the game is used to score a joke devoid of seriousness, had transformed into something with a lot of nerve and three voices. And luckily, David was critical, too, and helped me change the second voices I had been less fortunate with.

And then the day arrived at long last, in June 2021, when I could tell David that the next phase finally could begin: The mixing. So, once again we had "medley time", but by now, we had both become much more involved with what you can call adult life, so we decided to meet monthly. And I don't think either of us had anticipated that this would turn out to be the longest phase of the project! It spanned from February 2022 until September 2024. Most of the work was making sure the volume of the singing fit the volume of the instruments, but in addition to that, I had written up to several lists with adjustments that were a little more exotic than that - and David wrote one of his own. What if we added a crazy effect here, so that it sounds like the sound is coming out of a beat up stage rig? Can we add strings to this part? Can we make Harfest sound even MORE loud and ugly? Can we add an intro?? It seemed like David had determined to just go all in and let all my dreams come true, because even though I had marked several of the items on the list as "too much to ask, right?", he just kept asking for the next one and the next one, until the list was empty. To get to hear what you have only heard in your head for years, that's a special delight <3

Finally, the day came: After everyone around me had tired of hearing me say that the medley was "as good as done" AGES ago, the mixing was actually done. We had reduced everything down to one single sound file on David's PC. Could it truly be possible? David did something wonderful then: He invited a good friend to come hear it September 2024, and David and I held hands and cried with joy. There was no longer any doubt: David's part of the work was over.

At that point, only one thing remained: The video! Since all the way back at the start, I had had a clear idea for it: It was going to consist of screenshots from the game, with the lyrics underneath. I had gotten the screenshots the year before, by replaying the game for what I think was the sixth and seventh times, and collecting 600 of them. And the year before, i 2022, I'd spent ten hours making my own picture in the game's visual style, and then managed to delete both the file AND the backup file, forcing me to start aaaaaall over (it's the picture that is showing during the song Lori M.). I must say I'm especially proud of myself for not giving up then!

The work with the video was extremely on and off, and everyone kept hearing "sure, the medley is essentially done, I just need to spend.. well.." - and then there came a very unrealistic time estimate. But! Now, after most probably had given up believing it was ever going to happen, the medley IS done! There's no more! This is it! FINITO!

So, will there be any more songs from David and I, after all that? THE ANSWER IS YES! We've discovered that just meeting and working on something is so nice in and on itself, that neither of us wants to quit doing it : )  So, stay tuned! If you can stomach it after all my yapping about the medley, that is, haha <3