OUT NOW: The Song that Nearly Cooked Our Laptop

Ah, Rheckless. Words almost fail me when it comes to describing my personal relationship with this song. Hopefully you've heard it already, but if not, head over to our homepage and click through to your streaming platform of choice. I'll wait.

Rheckless was borne from a text Brianna sent me during our initial college years, a difficult and emotional time that made major waves in our existing friendship. Despite being separated by two hours of travel, my lack of a vehicle, and Brianna's lack of free time, the end of this period saw us closer than ever and with a slew of new, shared experiences under our belts, in no small part thanks to our very frequent text and phone conversations after each others' classes in the evenings.

February 6th, 2020. It was one such evening, and Brianna and I found ourselves lamenting ad nauseam about the state of the world. (Naturally, this being pre-March, we had yet to be desensitized by the cyclical carnival of crazy that would plague us all in the very short future, but I digress.)

Brianna, ever the harbinger of chaos, proceeded to inadvertently write what would soon become the chorus to the track that would one day revitalize a musical project that had yet to find its footing.

"Life is better when you're reckless," she wrote. And while the conversation moved on - "Am I talking to Brianna or listening to a punk rock track," I joked - the music part of my mind did not.

The melody of Rheckless's chorus came quite effortlessly from here. Repeating the word "reckless" twice lent itself well to a sort of chanted rhythm, and the rhyme "checklist" came effortlessly. The backburner sizzled away, while the front of my mind focused on graduating, jobless, into the middle of a pandemic. As Kim and I took advantage of the downtime to very slowly plug away at a FSOF concept album idea that has since been shelved, "Life is better when you're reckless" kept returning to my mind like an earworm.

Finally putting pen to paper (or rather cursor to piano roll) was liberating. I started in order with the piano chords heard at the start of the track, writing a verse from Brianna's perspective about her current job at a fast food drive-through before transitioning into the chorus that started it all. From there, things really flew. It was Kim who suggested the stuttery first drop, as well as the chord progression switch-up for the bridge.

I rewrote the dubsteppy middle drop about three times. The lead-in to the drop, vaguely inspired by Skrillex & Bare Noize's "Scatta", remained the same in all variations, but older versions of the drop sounded a little too predictable for my liking. I stepped away from the project for a long time before settling on the sustain-oriented pattern and moving on to my verse and the ever-so-slightly future-bass-y finale, one of the ideas for the song that had stayed the same from inception to completion.

There was just one problem.

By this point in the production, the file size had ballooned to well over 7GB, with only basic vocals recorded and minimal effects processing. Our computer, a secondhand 2014 MacBook Pro, struggled to play the song more than a quarter of the way through without throwing a System Overload error. Once I'd tracked my own vocals, the project file weighed in at about 10GB, with Brianna's (recorded much more recently) adding a few hundred more megabytes. Nevertheless, Brianna and I were glued to this project and agreed that this song absolutely had to see the light of day, come hell or elevated H2O.

I then flushed everything down the toilet via the major no-no of upgrading my OS. Yes, I can hear the producers among us facepalming already. This was something I had been carefully avoiding for literal years but unwisely caved due to a third-party audio plugin no longer being able to update on my old operating system. It was an idiotic decision, and it wreaked havoc on the poor laptop's aging hardware. What a local computer shop identified as some sort of software-induced memory leak led to 40-degree Celsius internal temperatures, constant overheating, and a MUCH lower threshold for Logic to start throwing that System Overload error. Overnight, the file Rheckless became unplayable without severe CPU stuttering that sounded much like a scratched CD being read by a dying Pet Valu laser pointer. These skips persisted even in exported versions of the song, meaning there was no way to render out the newest versions of the song without the audible corruption.

I don't know how to stress this enough. I spent well over a month and a half combatting this. A third-party app called SSD Fan Control became necessary to regulate temperatures, even if only by a tiny bit. Still, the stuttering plagued the project file. Multiple times I wrote Brianna explaining that the release may need to be scrapped. Our planned Halloween release date flew past. I consulted Reddit to no avail. I perused years-old forums for answers. After trying a tip from a YouTube comment section, I got things working for all of five minutes before Logic decided to relapse, sending me on an emotional roller coaster fit for a Six Flags park.

Things looked bleak.

It was on a particularly dismal evening very recently that I came up with not a solution, but a potential workaround. "What if..." I thought, "What if the complexity of the project file is the issue? What if I Save As a few times, create three different versions of the project, and erase a third of the song in each version...export these thirds, and stitch them together as audio?"

You're probably wondering how well this worked, or if it worked at all. For answers, please consult your favourite online streaming service and check out the new Fifteen Seconds of Fish release. You might like what you hear.

The FishBook lives another day to help us finish off the last of the mastering and mixdowns for Red Meter EP. In the meantime, Rheckless, its lead single, is our gift to you. Never before have I been so passionate about a release, and I hope you feel the same way.

It's been a two-year journey with much knowledge gained, one band member lost, and one computer half-checked out. Time for a little breather.

Ben and Brianna out, but only for a minute.