Someone You Loved (ft. Chang)
Lewis Capaldi, Performed by Brian the Amateur, Featuring Chang Luo
(Listen at the bottom of the page)
This is the first time of me collaborating with Ms. Chang Luo, aka Christy. She told me that she basically doesn’t really use her English name, so per her wish, her name in the song title is “ft. Chang”. She asked me if I wanted to form a two-people band together on my birthday, and I said sure. It should be fun.
In this song, Chang plays the piano, while I sing. I have never heard this song before, even though it has been on the Billboard for quite some time now, allegedly. Originally I was going to let her play the piano for “Imagine” by John Lennon, but apparently she doesn’t like the song, that’s why we did whatever song she liked. The song is kind of repetitive to me with such easy background music, so it should be easy to make. Turned out it was easy, on my part. She thought there were more instruments in the song other than the solo piano; I said no; she freaked out for a bit; and started to practice the piano part. Turns out the minors in this sheet music was really killing her even though she is a Level 10. I was so glad that I wasn’t the one playing the piano, or else you will never be able to hear this song in your life time.
The original song was a little bit high for me, that’s why I lowered the piano digitally after she recorded her part. Then, we each recorded our parts, mine being way into the night because that’s when my sound was fully released from the chains of my throat. Delve into it, and recorded everything. Initially Chang wasn’t going to sing anything; but I asked her to sing the highest-pitched part of the song. One, because it is really high, I don’t want to break my voice and make it sound ugly; and two, she really has a good voice, plus, if she doesn’t contribute vocally, then this “ft” thing really doesn’t work. Everyone will just assume that it was me entirely.
Album Cover
The woman you see on the cover? That’s her. I told her we could do a hand thing together with me holding the mic and her playing the piano, much like the album cover in “Heaven to Earth”; yet she sent me this picture, and I was like, sure.
At first I didn’t know what to do with this picture. I have never made an album cover with a whole standing person. The closest I got was with the “The Longest Time” album cover, but that was with six people. That’s how it came to me, maybe I should make this album cover more like a magazine cover. That’s how I decided to add tiny word fillers to mimic the magazine feel. If you zoom in on the image, you can see that I am basically blabbering. There’s not much useful information like the one I did on “The Longest Time”.
About the title and the logo, it came to me that the background was just too bright. Having one or two layers of text to make it more visible doesn’t really help. That’s how I decided to add a third, this time, red, to make the texts pop out more. The result was fantastic, I didn’t know it would look this good, and it really did suit the red dress that Chang is wearing.
Although this is a sick looking picture, maybe next time I will try something else, because this looked nothing like a music album cover, but really looked like a magazine cover. Maybe next time I will not include small word fillers but with big ones.