Patreon Post-a-thon
From Natti:
hello internet!
I will be making a post here every day for the month of May to share the intense journey of building the 17-minute finale song “let go” from my upcoming orchestral pop album.
I have fought very hard to get to a place where I can be safe, quiet, calm, otherwise mostly undisturbed for the month - in my beloved Hollywood - and in every way able, fit, focused and motivated to finish this mammoth beast of a suite which has been haunting me since 2018 when I experienced a formative heartbreak.
This Patreon will serve as a space wherein anyone interested in “virtuosic songwriting” (the words of the great Kyra Sims to describe my work, not mine and I’m happy to admit that virtues can slide into vices without proper upkeep and/or perspective..) cannot only witness but participate in the ongoing conversation of constructing this epic from a massive mound of 5 hours of compositional material (yes, 5 hours - at least ).
Every day I will engage with the work actively first thing in the morning, wrestling with diagrams, voice memos, chords, lyrics, melodies, melody, feeling, and you can PLEASE tell me what you find more or less interesting, because this showcasing is for you to enjoy primarily (and secondarily good accountability for me!)
Since this is the first day of this 31-day challenge, today I’m mostly going to just give you the BASIC LORE and the syllabus for the month.
The gist: my album, “honestly, it was nothing” is 8 years in the making at this point. I experienced an intense whirlwind infatuation in the summer of 2018 that left me emotionally devastated for reasons that truly defy logic. The music that poured out of me was stunningly beautiful, mythic, intense, shockingly dense in its brightness and menacingly bright in its darkness. I hadn’t wanted to write this linear, narrative tale of gay romantic hopefulness that curdled rapidly into tragedy, but as it was happening, I knew I’d be foolish to fight the forceful flow of the muses’ river, that I’d just have to let it take me down and spit me out when my angels and my music spirits told me it was safe to walk on dry land again. Obviously, 7.5 hours years later, I’m still in need of processing this story somewhat and more importantly I know that there is something powerful in here for you, the listener and I want to put in the painstaking time required to turn it all into a gift, a medicine, a source of power as you navigate your emotional currents. Or you just find it totally aesthetically fascinating, sexy, beautiful and fun. I think I’m designing it to work on both levels.
There are six songs on this album:
1. “who I was” ~ about 4 minutes. springtime, falling in love, desire to dissolve a rigid ego and create a new gay Romantic narrative in the flesh, countless societal obstacles be damned. Catchy funky exhilarating grounded fun.
2. “I give up, I love you” almost 5 minutes. ~ post-solstice, eye of the summer, a dive off the cliff of devotion, gorgeous but death-defying. Harder to sing than it sounds, catchy as all fuck.
3. “why can’t I leave” ~ 4 minutes. the beginning of an unease, a sensually charged ballad-bop of emotional frustration, a virgin gay princess nervously shaking their long locks from the late-summer tower. Weirdly hard to sing but extremely catchy.
4. “Promise anything” - a 9-minute crowd favorite of a rollercoaster fantasia featuring a virtuosic piano part I love to play and endlessly unfurling sections that never repeat but flow seamlessly, a last romantic brave stance defending the love connection against the cruel world. Weirdly catchy.
5. “Tommy” - two and a half minutes. a crowd favorite that’s already been covered by two of my favorite singers in the world (upon their request if you can believe it! One a Broadway legend lady, the other a prominent classical gent ). This is a haunting, weirdly sexy tune about realizing the connection is well and truly over and that I will never be the soft loved held innocent boy that this guy’s ex represented for me. This song came from a place of utter devastation and I am so proud I was able to weave something as solid as this under the circumstances. I cried nonstop for so long that fall. It’s also darkly funny at times and maybe even a touch potential-villain-origin-story? I can definitely see Lena Headey’s Cersei singing a cover of this named after Ned Stark’s sister after realizing Robert Baratheon would never lover her … will our protagonist let the bitterness consume and armor her as it did the Queen in Game of Thrones? We shall see…
Which brings us to:
6. Let go - hopefully no longer than 17 minutes. Maybe 25 would be acceptable IF it’s riveting and airtight from tip to toe - and also appropriate given what they say about letting go taking about as long as the relationship lasted in the first place. We will see. It shan’t exceed 25, I promise you that at the very least (we DO need to promise some things, oooooo )…
God. Where do I start?
This one’s whittling, weaving, deconstructing, re-invigorating, re-imagining and re-living shall be the work of May 2026, 7 and a half years after-the-fact, an epic finale synsethizing various compositional motifs presented in the previous songs while also presenting new flavors of anger, new melodies and rhythms of deep sensuality, new psychic portals and poignant backstories, new vocal depths of despair and an instrumental coda that I was actively sobbing through while writing.
Last month in LA - before my April of Club Cumming shows and studio sessions - I’d already taken several days at a dear friend’s home to start poring through the 5 hours of material and combing for the essential gems and the patterns between each download/channeled melody/lyrical haelstrom. I was humbled by the mountain before me. I am not daunted, but I respect the difficulties ahead - logistical and compositional, yes, but also psychic and emotional.
Love you ALL. I’m gonna go deep, drill down and have some fun amidst the sweat and tears here, and thrilled you’re with or just cheering me on x
