Producing Shades of Life has been an exciting journey. Most of the pieces of the album were written in 2020 and 2021. Some are revisions of earlier pieces. They all started with a flow of ideas that occurred to me as I sat playing about on the piano. Capturing fleeting ideas is no easy feat, as they dissolve the moment you try to jot them down. The creative process of composing is very diverse: it is a combination of improvising on the piano, collecting useable fragments, and merging them into larger structures. It is about experimenting with harmonies, rhythms, melodies and bass patterns. It is also about taking a moment to zoom out, listen, and then scrap or rearrange whole sections. And at a certain moment, after endless polishing, you have to decide that a piece is ‘finished.’ This whole creative process is something I love doing this after a day of hard work.
After the writing process came the recording part, which must have been one of the most intense weeks in my life. With pianist Mattias Spee and a whole team we had rented a beautiful quaint little church in Brabant, the Netherlands. We spent nights full of recording music, talking politics and sampling vegan delicacies.
In the following months, we edited, mixed and mastered the sound files. And finally, Snakewood Editions helped with the butterfly theme design and production process.
