Cardboard Box House

It all started with the seventh song I ever created, back when I was 17. It was a track that tried to find the positive side of life and leave behind some life lessons… a 17-year-old kid trying to teach something about life? Yeah, unbelievable.

What I didn't know then was that those textbook lessons were useless; they ywere just isolated phrases and pretty slogans. My life was built on fallacies, on generic quotes from thinkers, on weak foundations… and that simply couldn't last forever.

Who could have imagined the collapse would be so massive? I crashed into a concrete wall at full speed, and while I was on the ground picking up my own teeth, life kept kicking me in the stomach.

Fifteen years later, I took that innocent theme—which was just basic piano chords—and reimagined it. I transformed it, gave it the depth a work of art deserves… I gave it a brushstroke of my heart. To do that, I needed to tell the true story without making its origin disappear. That is how I chose to create "Cardboard Box House."

Basically, "Cardboard Box House" attempts to represent through disco-electronic styles at the beginning of the song how "cool" life can feel when you think you are successfully surfing it—like when someone is building a house of cards or a pyramid, and everyone watches because of how interesting and cool they look doing it.

That is why the rhythm is danceable; everything flows. But then, reaching the end of the track, the story is revealed, and the inevitable reality arrives: the nearly finished house of cards begins to catastrophically collapse to its foundations.

This is what happens when you build on weak bases, on foundations that look pretty but in the long run break like oatmeal cookies.

To represent the onset of the disaster, the disco rhythm abruptly switches to a very rhythmic piano, which is gradually joined by a second piano playing a very brief passage with a slight air of Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells." Then the low tones of a guitar are added, and just as the listener is getting used to this rhythmic "crescendo," the instruments stop to make way for a sort of low-string ensemble in a style reminiscent of "Clubbed to Death"—except that in this case, an electric guitar enters with solos that magnify the fall.

I should mention that during the days I had to record the guitar, I was working making video games for a company, and right at that point, I had been defrauded and fired. In every single note of the guitar that resonates, bringing the fall to its climax, it is not just the fall of the kid I once was, but also of the adult from whom everything is snatched away—the deception and collapse of the system, the glitch in the true Matrix.

The guitar solo could have lasted several minutes, and I know I wouldn't have been the only one to enjoy that, but at a certain point, I felt it would give too much weight to the fall, making the rest of the track irrelevant. I wanted the beginning to be important—without the "innocence," the fall would mean nothing.

So, what I did was apply a fade-out at the end. In fact, if you listen closely, you can hear in the fade-out that I am still playing guitar solos; I was truly letting out notes from my soul.