GIVE ME A REASON

WHY I COVERED BOY HARSHER’S “GIVE ME A REASON”

I didn’t sit down one day and decide I needed to cover a Boy Harsher song.

I was playing around with some staccato synth notes when I stopped and realized: this sounds exactly like “Give Me a Reason.”

So I figured, well, they’re one of my influences. Let’s just make this happen.

That was pretty much the entire planning process.

HOW I FOUND BOY HARSHER

I first heard Boy Harsher by accident.

Sometime around 2021, I had a random mix playing on YouTube and “Come Closer” came on. I didn’t know much about them at the time, but something about it immediately worked for me.

Boy Harsher eventually became one of the influences I mention most when people ask me about music. Usually I’ll pull them up and show someone a song, and then they get hooked too.

There’s a simplicity to what Augustus Muller and Jae Matthews do that I really like. Augustus can build an entire atmosphere out of a few synth parts, while Jae’s voice has this hypnotic quality that sits perfectly inside of it.

“Give Me a Reason” has all of that.

But the part I really love is the bridge.

That bridge is just to die for.

The rest of the song establishes this particular mood, and then the bridge takes me somewhere completely different without feeling like it belongs to another song. I think that was probably the part I was most excited to work with when I decided to cover it.

TRYING TO PLAY SOMEONE ELSE’S SYNTHS

I made the entire cover in Logic Pro.

Whenever I cover somebody else’s music, I want to be faithful to the original. I’m not particularly interested in taking a song, completely dismantling it and calling it a cover.

I want you to recognize the song.

But I also want there to be a reason to listen to my version.

For me, a lot of that comes from synth layers. I love stacking sounds and finding little parts that can change the feeling of a section without changing the song underneath it.

I also learned something while making this cover:

I am not particularly fast at learning music by ear.

Trying to figure out Augustus’ synth melodies involved a lot of listening, pausing, playing, realizing I was wrong, going back, listening again and trying another note.

Repeat.

Eventually I got there.

There’s something useful about doing that with somebody else’s music. When you’re writing your own song, you can change a melody whenever you want. If something isn’t working, congratulations, the song works differently now.

You can’t really cheat like that when you’re trying to understand what somebody else played.

It forced me to listen more carefully.

THE BRIDGE

The bridge is where I let myself move further away from the original.

I wanted that section to feel like it suddenly opened into something larger and more threatening.

I brought in an arpeggiated bass line and used an “Abyssal Horn” sound to add some extra dread underneath it.

That became my favorite change in the cover.

The structure of the song didn’t need to change. The bridge was already doing exactly what a good bridge should do. I just wanted to push that moment further in my version.

That actually taught me something about my own songwriting.

You don’t always need to reinvent the structure of a song to make something interesting happen.

A bridge can completely change the energy of a track for a moment, take the listener somewhere else, and then drop them back into a song they already recognize.

I started paying more attention to that afterward.

MAKING THE VOCALS MINE

The vocals were both easy and a little difficult.

Jae Matthews has such a recognizable delivery that trying to imitate her would have been pointless. And I didn’t really want to.

So tonally, I deviated from the original.

I sang it the way I would sing it.

That distinction ended up being one of the things I liked most about the finished version. The song still sounds like “Give Me a Reason,” but the vocal isn't me trying to become Jae Matthews for a few minutes.

It sounds like me covering Boy Harsher.

That’s what I wanted.

I hope it’s something they’d be proud of.

WHY COVERS MATTER TO ME

I’ve always thought a cover should exist somewhere between respect and interpretation.

There are parts of “Give Me a Reason” I didn’t want to mess with because they’re part of why I love the song in the first place. There are other places where I heard an opportunity to bring in the things I like doing with Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness.

Listening to my version now, that distinction is what I’m most proud of.

You can hear the original song in it.

You can also hear me.

There wasn’t some particular moment in the history of Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness that led to this cover. I had a synth in front of me. Logic was recording. I played something that reminded me of a Boy Harsher song.

So I made the Boy Harsher song.

Sometimes that’s enough of a reason.