Blind Painting Inside the Lines

Now I will explain how I reached this point, starting from a track I composed at 17 that lacked layers.

Back then, around 2005, I had a dream in which I was walking to my grandmother’s house (five blocks away), and on one of the streets, people began to camp. Seeing this, neighbors on every street came out and started camping as well. The noise of the world stopped, cars no longer passed, and traffic was no longer a danger; you could sleep in the street without a worry.

Everyone shared food, and some played music around a campfire in the middle of the street—it was all unity, community, and peace. Following this dream, I composed the foundation of the song, which spoke of an "excellent" world and human beings living as brothers.

Looking back fifteen years later, the joke tells itself. Individualistic people sharing? Peace in a world at war? There were very interesting intentions in my heart, but they do not coincide at all with, nor are they a possibility in, today’s world.

Streets filled with trash, broken pavement, malfunctioning cars spewing smog, while people walk on the sidewalk with their heads down—no touching, no looking at each other, total disconnection. Don't misunderstand me; it's not that I want everyone to hold hands in a communist world. I am simply pointing out that my vision back then clashed sharply with the blunt reality.

It was through these two visions—utopia and rawness—that I completely reimagined the song to give it depth.

The beginning of the song is full of harmonics; everything unfolds calmly. It is like the inner peace of watching a blind person who, with patience and practice, paints their coloring book inside the lines.

Instruments are gradually added to enhance that beauty—the splendor of the miracle of human resilience, which achieves things beyond the capacities imposed upon it. The inspiring beauty of the blind person painting inside the lines; the promise of a wonderful world.

Some notes are not in exact time; I decided to leave them as they were in the first take and not re-record them as I usually do. I felt that the very idea of a blind person painting inside the lines needed to maintain some human imperfections—not only to distance myself from AI-generated material, but primarily to highlight the beauty that, despite not being a perfect path, the blind person is mostly painting within the lines, and there is a human margin of error that makes it special.

After all, if someone with perfect sight painted between the lines perfectly, would it have any narrative epicness? Could a song be written about it?

But that epicness begins to take on a strange flavor as the sweet sound transforms through transitions between acoustic and electric guitar, with a tone that is somewhat anguished and heavy. This is to emphasize that, within the beauty of what he is achieving, the blind person also endured a bitter struggle. And it is the prelude to what follows...

Beats throb to the rhythm of a heart until they stop. There is a brief silence, a pause. An electric guitar appears, along with a cello producing a sound similar to a locomotive (using the sul ponticello technique). The atmosphere of the song has completely changed.

The blind person was attempting to paint between the lines under the moved eyes of the spectator, but looking from a distance at the end, the blind person painted outside the lines—he painted the floors, he painted the walls. Now you can see the disaster. What you believed to be beautiful and inspiring has revealed its true face, transforming into chaos.

I added a rather messy drum track that I could have easily fixed, but remember that the perfection you long for is vanishing before your very eyes. In fact, it finishes fading away with a piano solo (with a slight Jerry Lee Lewis feel), accompanied by those heartbeats once again.

The beautiful colors turned into irreparable scratches, into scribbles. Then, the distorted guitar lets one last loose note ring out. But I didn't let it ring fully; I cut it off halfway, dry, which produces a final echo. To create this effect, I had to abruptly unplug the amplifier at the exact moment I wanted to generate that cut.

The world you thought was perfect is a society of maniacs.