It Starts With Me – Free Spirits Rising

You can hear the song here.

On September 17, 2013 the first lyrical draft was written. The song was called “The Weak Will Take Over The World” or “TWWTOTW” for short.

The lyrics went like this;

The Weak Will Take Over The World

Another day / Another night doing time / Is this the heaven / That we wanted to be in

Another day / Another night waiting in line / Is this the heaven / That we wanted to be

Beaten into submission / Until we make a stand / From desperation / Say hello to motivation

One day it will come to pass / The weak will take over the world / Mark these words / They are far from absurd / It will come to pass / The weak will take over the world

Then in Jan 2014, I joined a few lyrical ideas together and I sort of had a complete lyrical draft.

On April 25, 2014, I added music (which is the finger picked “E” to “A” and then “C#m” to “B” and “A” chord progression) to the lyrics and recorded the first draft in acoustic on my voice memos.

And it sat there until March 23, 2021 when I started working on it in the studio.

But in the 7 years from when I did the acoustic demo, I did play around with the main riff and created derivative versions of it. So when I started working on it in the studio, I had a few ideas as to what should come after.

But the first studio version was done on clean tone electric guitar and after 4 weeks I scrapped that version and re-recorded the guitars on my Maton acoustic. You can still hear the electric version sounding all spectrally and low in the mix.

Lyrically, the phrasing was off, so I kept tweaking the words and the flow of the melody.

As a byproduct the song title changed from “The Weak Will Take Over The World” to “When The Fragile Succeed” to “It Starts With Me”.

I suppose the tile change was inevitable.

I’ve been reading a lot of self development books and listening to podcasts on the many different subjects, so I wasn’t really surprised that I started to write lyrically about it.

The cover was meant to be a lot more interesting. The title was going to be spray painted on a wall. I did a quick draft drawing of it.