How "Mickey Mouse / James Dean" Was Written

man, -this- song. this was born from the early writing sessions, when i came up with this little guitar idea…

then, i put that idea into a looper and found this wild arpeggiator esque composition, and together that inspired a vocal. i’m just ad libbing here, not really knowing what i’m saying - something to the effect of ‘i’ll come around anytime’, or something.

those ideas sat in the ‘vault’ for months and months. then, there was one summer sunday where i was super bummed, so what i decided to do was drive out of town while listening to Tyler, the creator’s “flower boy”. as soon as i came back from that drive, i immediately went into my room and wrote this:

aaron was tepid on this one. he liked a lot of different parts of it enough that he found validity in the whole thing, but i don’t think he was immediately sold. I remember him being like ‘what’s the point of the ending, what were you wanting to do?’ and I was like ‘i dunno, just something different’. i think it was at this point that aaron dug into the archives of the early writing sessions and found the ‘staccato’ memo along with the loop, and was like ‘these can totally be strung together’. It was weird, they were in the same key and almost the same tempo and everything.

this was the closest to the final product the ‘demo’ version got. i wrote the bridge portion using my own string sounds, but passed it to aaron to make it truly epic. in doing so, he ended up altering the chord progression a bit to make it super goosebump-worthy. seriously.