Nightwalker is a revived and rejuvenated version of an earlier arrangement which I produced about three years ago. The original, which is on my SoundCloud, is largely a Weeknd-inspired beat. In the original, the intro piano motif serves as the main melodic hook throughout the tune. However, this new rendition has completely stepped away from that approach, relying mostly instead on a new progression.
 

I decided to whip up this song as the fifth installment in my 10-in-10 songwriting challenge. It was originally intended to be a submission for a songwriting contest, though I quickly realized that songwriting contests are all pretty much scams. This instead became on opportunity to test out my songwriting, production, and engineering skills under a time crunch. It was a grind of a week to finish- an extreme grind for 6 days- to take the project from start to finish.

This is the most number of tracks I’ve had on a project for any of my recent releases. This is also the first track which I’ve programmed drums for- which means that I had individual tracks for the kick, snare, crash, ride, hi-hat, and toms. I also had individual tracks for piano, bass guitar, flute, group violins, solo violin, cello, tuba, trombone, group trumpets, and a synth bass, bringing us to a total of 16 tracks. I know that pales in comparison to some modern pop tracks. But compared to recent works like the piano version of The Queen’s Waltz and March of the Rabbit, which only have a single piano track, it was a lot to work with.

Needless to say, this project presented so many opportunities to learn about the processes of recording, mixing, mastering, producing, and creating the visual landscape of the music.

The last night of my final day of mixing, my fiancee and I went out to downtown Santa Cruz from about 10:00 PM to 1:00 AM to do a shoot to get the cover photo. The idea I had in mind was to capture a scene of a woman running through the night, with an element of fear and confusion present. I knew I wanted the stark red light against the dark of night. But when we went out to shoot, it took us a while to get anything close to the vision that could really work. After playing around withe camera in different locations, lightings, and techniques, we were just about ready to give up. But as we were walking down the street, I started to shoot while holding a red filter over the lens while cars drove back her. The headlights of the cars backlit my fiancee, and the red filter made the whole thing look like a scene from some crazy dream. Eventually we got enough photos and went through them later to find the shot which would later become the cover.

Nightwalker became a huge creative push and a nice break from working on the different versions of The Queen’s Waltz. It provided me a chance to showcase a new side of my musical character and my creative instincts. It’s my hope that listeners can have as much fun listening to Nightwalker as I had making it!

Nick Sax