How "Cornell" Was Written

Cornell has one of the most interesting stories with regards to how it came to be. it honestly all started with this pretty banal juno-106 idea. the chords are not robust, but i was obsessed with the tone and the glide.

then, i was inspired to add some lyrics. i was loving the idea of going super ‘personal’ with this one and including lots of artifacts of reality in the words.

i was loving this idea, but Aaron wasn’t very inspired by it. he thought it was a little too muted or ‘straight ahead’. so he challenged me to make it denser and more angular. that’s when i came up with this chord progression.

as the song built up, we realized that this electronic version of it would actually be better elsewhere in the record (you’ll have to stay tuned to see where). but, we more or less stopped here and decided to take everything we built and convert it to an orchestral version, which aaron did on his own. Aaron tweaked the chord progression to involve more proper voice leadings and adapt it to make it work for the orchestra. here is a beautiful instrumental version of the song so that you can hear purely what aaron did :)