Good for You
What's up? Rome here. First off, I want to thank each and every person who's been supporting us so far. It's been a lot of fun and we're so excited for the future of The Keymakers. Good for You has been featured on some amazing Spotify-curated playlists, and it's already gotten over 30,000 plays on Spotify alone! Trust me when I say that we appreciate every single one. Now that we're officially a little over a week past the release, I wanted to share a little bit more detail about our debut track, and how 'Good for You' got to where it is today:
Rederic and I live together now, so it's the ideal situation for collaboration. We got a nice little room set up, and we can just go in and create. Back when we first started working together, though, and when we were working on this song, he was still a senior in school and I was here in Boston. So except for when we were on trips together to Toronto or Miami, we never really had time to create in the same room. Sometimes, Rederic would send me beats, and I would just get to work writing and recording over them on my own. Other times, I would write a song with only piano behind it, and send it to Rederic to produce around.
With this song, Justin sent me the 'Good for You' beat, and I immediately loved it. But back then, there was no 'drop', and the entire structure of the song was completely different than it is today. It was all smooth all the way through, and the beat immediately gave me some pretty strong old-school Ne-Yo vibes, a singer and songwriter I grew up being really inspired by. Anyways, the writing and melodies came to me really quickly because I just vibed with the beat so much.
I finished recording the track, and I thought we had a pretty good one on our hands. We took it up to Toronto to our AMAG crew with a bunch of other tracks to potentially record for real. We played it for our people that were in that particular session: JC (our manager and mentor), BC (one of the most talented musical engineers in music), and Yanchan, Spira, and Pyro (three awesome musicians and people from the AMAG collective). They liked it, but JC thought it needed something more--the 'drop'. So that right there was actually the first time Rederic and I ever produced together. We sat down at the keyboard and created the melody for the drop that you hear today--that was A LOT of fun.
A couple months later we played the song for AM, who is the creator and leader of AMAG, and he really liked it too, but felt it wasn't quite all the way there. He worked with us on restructuring the track (the current bridge used to be the chorus), and helped us add in some additional percussive elements to build up to the drop. The man's skills are unreal. He also suggested we add some different vocal flavors to it, and we ended up having the incredibly talented Zxandria lay down some vocals on top of mine. Finally, we got JC to throw in some backing vocals during the bridge as well.
I guess the moral of the story is: The song has just grown so much from that first beat that Rederic produced, and part of the reason we wanted it to be our first release is that it was SUCH a team effort. A lot of what Rederic and I do is just the two of us being in a room together and creating, but so much of music is about collaboration, and Rederic and I really believe in that. This particular song wouldn't have gotten to where it is without the support and talent of quite a few individuals.
We're really proud of the song, and couldn't be more excited about the feedback we've been getting so far, but we also can't wait to show y'all what else we've been working on. Until the next release, please continue to enjoy! Again, thank you SO so much. And thanks for reading!
Rome
