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BEHIND "FLOWN":
For me, “Flown” is more than a song. It’s a verb. It’s an adjective. It’s a subatomic particle that is ever changing — just as I am. “Flown” is about liberation and personal transformation.
Listening to the lyrics of my song, “Flown,” feels like some sort of time travel. It’s like I received a message from my future self, telling me what I would ultimately experience through the process of creating the song — but at the time I didn’t realize what I was doing. Honestly, the meaning of the song came to life as I lived through the process of composing, producing and recording it. “Flown” was born during the COVID Pandemic, at a time when so much was uncertain — and I was equally uncertain about my career as a singer/songwriter. “Stumbling through the desert/Don’t know what I’ll find.” I had gone through a long dry period after releasing my first solo EP, “Beautiful Love” in 2017 and was nervous about creating new music with no official record label or producer to help, when percussionist Christian Moraga (who plays on the track) suggested I produce my own music.
The iconic chorus of “Flown” actually came to me one day when we were rehearsing at his studio. We had taken a break and I started messing around on the keyboard. I had no idea what I was doing, but suddenly found myself playing a hypnotic piano pattern that just felt “right” under my fingers. When Christian asked me what it was, I told him I had just come up with it — and the rest of the song soon followed.
From that point on, I had only one goal — to somehow capture what I heard playing in my mind as clearly and as accurately as I could. With most of the world shut down during the COVID Pandemic, this meant learning how to become my own producer, edit my own tracks, and record my own vocals and keyboards from my apartment. (We even recorded some of the percussion from Christian’s apartment.) I had to coordinate studio sessions and home studio recordings with the other musicians on the track, and then edit their recordings before passing them along to engineer Thai Long Ly for mixing and mastering. It was a challenging process. I had to face my own fear of not feeling qualified to produce my own song (and at times feeling like I didn’t even understand my own song), but somehow I figured it out step by step. “I stumbled through the darkness/Now I see the light.”
This process of creativity brought me to an expanded realization of myself, which is ultimately the message of the song. It was like going into the desert and trying to survive — it’s dry, it’s extreme, but once you find your way through, it can be so beautiful. I believe that we each have the ability to access our own unique creative voice and the only way to hear it is to go on the journey of stepping into our own creative desert. Although you never know what you will find, one thing is for certain: when the previous versions of yourself come to look for you, “They will find: This bird has flown.”
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