SHADOW
“Shadow” is a cover, but I don't really think of it as just a cover.
It's more of a thank-you.
Chromatics is one of the bands that helped inspire me to start writing music in the first place. Not because I wanted to sound exactly like them, but because their music made me want to make something of my own.
That goes back quite a bit further than Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness.
HOW I FOUND CHROMATICS
In 2009, I watched Bronson with Tom Hardy and heard Glass Candy.
That sent me down a rabbit hole.
I discovered Johnny Jewel and eventually Chromatics, and their music became something I kept coming back to over the years.
Long before I started writing my own songs, that music had already found a place in my life.
My husband and I are homebodies. One of our favorite things to do is stay home, light the fire pit in the backyard, and put on our “Best of Backyard Nights” playlist.
Chromatics became part of that soundtrack.
There's something about sitting outside at night with someone you've built a life with, listening to music you've heard a hundred times, and still wanting to hear it again.
Those songs become attached to places and people without you really noticing it happening.
Eventually, “Shadow” became one of those songs for me.
WHY SHADOW
When I started Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness, I knew pretty quickly that I wanted to record “Shadow.”
I thought I could preserve what I loved about the original while changing it just enough to make the recording feel like mine.
That's the difficult part about covering a song you genuinely love.
Change too much and you can lose the thing that made you want to cover it in the first place. Change too little and there's not much reason for your version to exist.
I wasn't interested in rebuilding “Shadow” from the ground up.
I wanted the subtleties to do the work.
MAKING IT MINE
I increased the tempo by eight BPM and made the synthesizers more dynamic, but I tried to keep the feeling of the original intact.
The changes aren't supposed to announce themselves.
That was the point.
I wanted my version and the Chromatics version to feel related while still having enough of Prophets of the Cosmic Darkness in mine that the two could exist beside each other.
It also came together much more easily than I expected.
I finished it in about a week.
At that point I was just in the zone. I was making music, learning quickly, and wanted to get something out into the world.
Having an existing song to work from probably helped. I wasn't staring at an empty project wondering what the song was supposed to become. The song already existed. My job was figuring out what I could bring to it without getting in its way.
A THANK-YOU
I didn't record “Shadow” hoping Chromatics would hear it.
I didn't make it because I wanted attention from them.
Obviously, if they ever happened to hear it, that would be pretty incredible. But that's not why it exists.
I made it because their music did what I think music is supposed to do.
It affected somebody.
It became part of my life. It played in my backyard with my husband. It stayed with me for years. And eventually, it helped inspire me to stop just listening to music and start making it myself.
