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fmdtaeyongarchive · 4 years

Text

↬ do as your heart tells you.

date: january to early february 2020. some time around there.

location: ash’s apartment.

word count: 1,839 words, not including lyrics.

summary: n/a.

notes: creative claims verification. mentions of youngjoo because... yeah. if you thought i would proofread this and/or provide anything of quality, you thought wrong.

it’s been ages since he wrote something truly sweet, or it feels that way to ash. in truth, he doesn’t know that he’s in the right headspace to be writing anything sweet, but he’s supposed to come back in the spring and he needs to give bc something or they’ll give him something and that’s the last thing he wants if he’s to be honest. he knows he can call up one of the in-house producers he’s grown closer to in the past year, but he’s afraid to end up with another “romanticism”. he isn’t embarrassed of that song, but it hadn’t been the song he’d have written on his own, so he resolves to do just that for this one. it won’t be the first song he creates unaided by any measure, but it’s the first time doing it with the sole intent of proving himself in this way.

he starts it with a beat. as his sound has grown more and more inspired by rhythm and blues, ash has discovered how helpful starting with a beat can be. for years, at the beginning of his songwriting journey, he’d begun songs from the point he knew best. this meant creating chord structures based on a piano or guitar instrumental, but he’s a professional now and he doesn’t have a beatmaker simply for appearance’s sake. different songs call for different processes and a hit needs a good beat.

bc has never let him write one of his promoted singles entirely on his own before. they haven’t exactly given him the go ahead yet this time either, but he’s determined to do it on his own. every comeback, he sees the same comments about how his songwriting is an image they’re pushing. as an idol, and the claims that he must not have the skills to do it on his own. it’s not most people, but even a minority claiming that he’s getting credit when his collaborators, the serious professional producers, do all the heavy lifting, nag at his dignity as a songwriter. it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate all of the hard work others put in when he works with them, but, after a while, the comments have begun to get to him too. is he good enough or is he being hard-carried by those with degrees in music production and jobs earned by their skill at song making?

being an idol isn’t defined by being a pretty face alone like so many would believe. ash will argue that until the day he dies. songwriting ability certainly isn’t a requirement. in fact, ash thinks some companies would prefer their idols don’t express interest in the creation of songs at all beyond the performance, but stamping the title of idol onto his job description never sucked dry ash’s love of music and his desire to create it. if anything, being thrown song after song he couldn’t stand only pushed him more into a desire for control over what he’s putting out. he can pretend he’s unbothered by online commentators thinking they know more about the work he puts into one of the few passions he has left than he does, but even knowing he shouldn’t really care, his attempt at indifference had cracked almost immediately.

he’s only playing around at first, not set on the sound he wants for the song. it’s a song that’s supposed to represent the season of spring, though, and he does know what he wants spring to be. perhaps it’s cliche and he should try to avert expectations instead of falling deep into the pothole in the road they are, but, to him, spring is love, new and pure and passionate. following the cold push and pull game of winter, it’s the blossoming warmth of an embrace between new lovers and falling in love with love.

the beat he creates is slow and plodding, a classic accent on the type of slow jam r&b the song heads toward as he experiments with the composition. he lays held chords over it and the instrumental feels lazy in all of the right ways, like a slightly chilly morning spent in bed with a lover as the sun begins to spill in through the window.

it’s a fantasy. that experience isn’t one he has much anymore, not in the way he’s thinking of it. the last time he had, it had been with youngjoo, and what they are to each other… it doesn’t fit the song he’s trying to write.

that’s what he tells himself, and then promptly gets stuck trying to capture the feelings he wants to bring to life. he has a base, but there’s little more to it than that and he needs more than a skeleton to convince bc entertainment that he’s good enough on his own to have their promotion budget put behind the song.

it’s like his brain hits a roadblock and for days, no matter how hard he tries to write, nothing good comes to him. he neglects other songs he’s supposed to be working on and switches up keys and rhythms and a few alterations stick — they’re genuinely better than what he’d started with—, but all he winds up is a slightly different skeleton, not a fully-formed track.

then, he invites youngjoo over one night. he’s been locked up in his studio for days, not seeing anyone outside of the schedules he’s contractually obligated to attend, and he blames that fact and the drinks he has.

“it’s been a long week,” he confides to her, but quickly moves on so as not to lay the exhaustion of his creative block onto her. there’s nothing she can do to help. she has a way with music, but he’s too determined to do it all on his own to ask for help on this song.

she leaves and he finds himself drunk off of more than sweet liquor.

like he’s drawn by a force out of his control, ash’s feet pull him to his studio and he writes and rearranges and records. when he’s sober, he’ll cringe at his attempts at singing, but it’s more work on the song than he’s gotten done in a long while.

the fruits of his labor are there in the morning when he’s tending to his headache with his second cup of black coffee. the night prior isn’t a blur, but it’s not entirely clear to him either. he only recalls what he’d written when he finds the vocal files he’d recorded his lyrical ideas on.

they’re not bad.

and they’re not really about youngjoo, he tells himself. it’s about affection, infatuation, love… and if thinking of youngjoo the night before (that hadn’t gotten drowned out in his intoxication — he remembers vividly how the lyrics had come to be) had helped him connect to the emotions he wants to write the best, it doesn’t really mean anything.

he’d tried for days to write something romantic out of his imagination, but it had all fallen flat. he’d revisited his favorite romantic comedies and listened to his favorite love songs, but wasn’t until he’d spent an evening with youngjoo again that it had come easily to him.

it’s lingering memories of when they’d dated. yeah, that must be it because, yeah, he can admit he feels something for her, but it’s not that much — not enough to make him sound like he’s falling in love, something he hasn’t written much at all about since he’d ended his last relationship.

they’re sleeping together. of course ash feels something when they’re together. he’s never committed to the illusion of complete detachment from anyone he sleeps with. sex is inherently intimate, so, yes, he has words to write about the warmth of her gaze and the rose blush on her skin. sue him.

he goes over the lyrics again and it’s harder to convince himself of his own theory of revisiting past emotions because the words don’t convey distant feelings he can’t connect with anymore. if they were supposed to be far off memories, they aren’t. the fact that he can finish the lyrics sober and without a reminiscent mind is evidence of that. she comes to mind when he tries to re-record himself and it’s not a romanticized version of the past, when she’d been his girlfriend. it’s youngjoo, wearing what she’d been wearing the last time he saw her, with her hair styled the same and the air of ash’s apartment around them.

he ponders it. he can’t help it.

why had it been so much easier to break past the barrier drunk? had he thought he wouldn’t have to take responsibility for the words that came out? had he supposed, in the aftermath, he could blame it all on his delusional drunk mind? had that security blanket been what he needed to figure out the end of the song? because the blanket’s been ripped away now and the self-realization is an odd mix of too cold and too hot.

the words he’d built to flow off the end of the bridge are the ones that cling to him the most. no matter how he tries to focus on other parts of the song, his mind keeps floating back to the one question he’d repeated like an echo at the closing of the bridge section.

do you love me like i love you?

does he love her? drunk, he’d apparently thought he did, but that doesn’t make it true.

love is a scary word now in a way he’d never thought it could be to him. love. he’d said it so easily to youngjoo in such a short time when they’d been together, but that is lifetimes ago now. even when they’d broken up, he’d never regretted confessing the depth of his feelings to her. they’d been true and, if nothing else, he was an honest man who’d given his heart proudly.

the ash he is now isn’t the same. he can’t say it so easily, not when they’re like this and not when the pieces of his worn out heart are kept locked away in cages to keep him from the temptation of gluing them back together again and sacrificing the bloody, beating pulp of himself again to anyone when it’d failed every time before.

does she love him? no, of course she doesn’t. he’d hurt her and now they’re friends with benefits. those benefits happen to include a lot more emotional baggage than sex alone, and ash isn’t detached from reality enough to deny that, but emotional dependency doesn’t make love any more than sex itself does.

it pricks him like thorns in his back and he can’t ignore the feeling that crawls up his spine. it’s wrong to go back into the chorus after a question as earth shattering as that, so, in an impulsive outburst of risky creative decision-making, ash cuts the final chorus.

that’s it.

it will end with a bridge going nowhere. how fitting of the messy, bitter brew of feelings that had turned into a love song.

#fmdverification #&& when you're screaming but they only hear you whisper | self para #&& queued

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