A Chance Meeting

Jak (King Tear) was the first person I met when I moved down to Brighton after 11 years in London. I’d been living in Kemptown maybe a month and had taken the train up to Shoreditch one evening to eat at Oranj with some friends. Having underestimated how long the trip would take, I arrived late and sat in the only available seat at the end of the table - opposite my friend Luke and beside a girl I hadn’t met named Anna.

As it turned out, Anna knew nobody there; she was brand new to London, the sister of one of the waitresses at Oranj who was also a friend of my friend Giulia, which is why she was sitting with us. When I told her I made music and had just relocated to Brighton, she told me that a friend of hers, Jak, lived down there too and that she would set us up.

One year later, we were making this song together.

For both of us, it was our first time writing with another person, and maybe we were both a little nervous. During our first session, he showed me a chord progression he’d been working on. The very first thing that came to my mind is what I sang over it - which is now the chorus. We ad-libbed a verse each and went away to finish the lyrics. The song was written in a day.

The production was fairly straightforward, too. Our manifesto was simple: don’t overthink it.

If only all songs came so easy.