Pretend To Feel

Pretend To Feel began as a dance track but quickly evolved into something more.

Musically, I asked what a song that skipped 50 years at a time - from the 1920s to the 1970s to the 2020s - would sound like. Then, I asked what people in each of those eras might have wanted the world to be like. I quickly realized that few of them would have wished for a world where people spend their days peering into their phones at the latest X posts.

This is a homage back to the "good old days" when such devices didn't exist. Of course, most other things about the world in those days were pretty bad, and nobody would want to go back to the medical technologies of the time. But most people can recall how much better it was to have to talk to a limited number of people in person and actually spend uninterrupted time with them.

This track also hits upon another issue with life - the idea that people actually care about you. Doctors see you for the 10 minutes you pay for, express sympathy, and then go home to exercise outdoors, while you are in pain and can't think of anything else. If you haven't yet been seriously ill, perhaps it hasn't hit you how most people spend their days self-absorbed, only talking to others the minimum amount to accomplish their own goals. This song expresses this pretend feeling.

I found that the models can actually directly compose pieces based upon specific influences, rather than just using genre tags. One can input tags like [James Bond Instrumental Interlude] and [Nier: Automata chords] - both of which were used here - and get an output influenced by that specific media.