adam'5 On the Making Of “friends”
What was the initial spark or idea that led to the creation of "friends?"
"friends" came to me as I was starting to struggle with authenticity in my music. For a week and a half, I left Paris, my city, to go live in a tiny apartment and focus on making music (the bed and the toilet were like, 1 meter away from each other hahaha). During that time, I meditated a lot, spent more than 2 hours each day walking in nature and really looking inwards to figure out what I had to say.
That's when most of my past relationships started popping back up. I ended up analyzing them and realized how most of them had ended. Usually, it was a mix of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and inability to truly open myself up to them. This lack of "realness" manifested itself in a hypersexuality that really ravaged my life in my early adulthood.
Can you talk about the recording and production process for "friends?"
As with most of my songs, "friends" first started as a line in my phone. I have a memo where I just write a bunch of random cool lines that come to mind. The first line I wrote was "I might be mental/I gave it all the thoughts I had but I have no words/Man, I have no angle". Liking the sound of it, I jumped into my DAW and started making the beat. As soon as the first draft was completed (I have 8 for this one), I started writing.
The whole thing was recorded, mixed, and mastered in my bedroom, by myself.
What impact do you hope this song will have on your audience?
I hope "friends" resonates with those people that feel they're "strange" for not being able to form meaningful connections with others, especially if they find themselves always returning to a physical connection rather than an emotional one. It's mostly that there is something within you that needs to be healed. Nothing is wrong with you; you're just hurt. I want my music to be able to press on that pain and direct my listeners to it directly so they're able to truly feel themselves for who they are.
Can you share a bit about your musical background and the journey that led you to where you are today?
This one is a little tricky to explain, but I've been making music for a very long time. If you dig a little, you can find the previous songs and projects that I worked on before releasing under adam'5.
But I grew up in a very musically fluent household; my mom listens to literally everything.
As for how I made it to where I am today, I think I stopped caring. Entirely and truthfully, the most important thing to me now is the music. I'll do everything I can to support the music, and the rest doesn't really matter to me.
How do you approach creating something new and different?
I try to keep myself writing and creating every day, or at least every week. Some of the songs coming out soon have been written in trains, airports, in the shower... The approach I have, I'd say, is one of constant immersion in creativity. This doesn't give enough time to my brain to "adjust" the authenticity, and makes it way easier for me to be truthful in what I say and how I make the music.
I never really think about making "different" music though. Mostly, I try to make the music as fast as I can without correcting anything. Once this first layer has been laid down, I do my best to correct the technical aspects of the songs without touching their essences. If it's a song that is clearly made by me, it's inevitably going to be different from anything else you've heard before.