Felix Jaehn & MESTO feat. VCATION - "Never Alone"
LyricsWIP I've seen your face here before sitting in the dark yeah
I don't know who you are but I'm just like you
So what's your name? Where you from?
Tell me 'bout your heartaches
I don't care what they say
They don't care about truth
No, you're never alone, never alone, never
There's so many hearts trying to find the answer
Never alone, never alone, never
Now feel the new uprising [...]
Sitting here with you now, wanna hear your story
We can walk, we can talk, we don't need to hide
In your eyes I can see it, there's a light when you're dreaming
I don't care what they say
They don't know about you
No, you're never alone, never alone, oh ever
When you feel lost I want you to know, I'm with you
Never alone, never alone, never
Now feel the new uprising
Background StoryWIPI went into this without a real concept of what I wanted to do, I just had one idea : Kat with a guitar.
He's not a good player, he's got the passion, but lacks the discipline to acquire the skills. So I just wanted him sitting alone, lost in the moment, plucking at the cords, as he manages to excavate a few tunes from this device. Simple notes, easy ones, but each one still vibrating with his entire soul.
So I posed him, added that tiny wall to have him sit against, and... this was pretty much it.
And whilst I waited for my first render to finish, I had another idea, which would then allow me to wrap this little scene into an entire story, and fill in a hole I'd left open for years : the wolf' and the foxes first encounter.
Back to the Lost Children storyline again, and to Kat, the wanderer, roaming the lands in search for a place to belong.
He's just been spit out into this world, and abandoned to himself. Been alone most of his life, and never had the chance to find out where he came from.
Who were his parents ? Were they like him ? What happened to them ? Were they wolves like him ? And where have all the wolves gone ? Can he find them ? Rejoin them ? Is there a place for him to call home ?
Many questions... so little answers.
So when one day the winds carried legends of wild tribes in the west, beyond the grass oceans and the lands of wood, far from the realms of Man - driven by both his human desires for answers and his animal desires for creature comfort he decided to undergo this journey.
No obstacle he didn't overcome, no struggles he didn't fight trough, no fall he didn't survive. And then, one day, the air in his lungs smelled different, the sun on his skin felt warmer, and the colors stretching to the horizon felt more vivid.
He had arrived to his destination.
But his enthusiasm didn't last long.
Those weren't the hills of the wolves. Those were the lands of the foxes.
He walked their roads, first with enthusiasm and pride. Came into their towns, observed their customs and crafts, listened to their talks and songs.
He felt disappointed, as this new world felt very much like the one he had abandoned.
But there was something else. Whereas he could venture the realms of Man with a certain ease as they'd treat him with indifference most of the time, here, it felt quite different.
Here, they didn't treat him with indifference. Here his presence clouded many of their conversations ; here, whenever he came close, voices would soften and change to whispers ; folks would interrupt their activities and head their attention towards him. And most of all, he knew how to read the looks they cast at him, and those all said the same :
"I don't trust him".
He was an intruder, a children of chaos.
He was a threat to these lands, and a threat to these people.
He, the wolf, was not welcome.
Kat's grown accustomed to rejection, thus it didn't upset him too much to experience the same here. In some ways, it was even refreshing, as despite it being the same, it at least tasted somewhat differently. A new flavor of rejection : bitterness.
And after a series of unfortunate events that he caused, the foxes, unnerved by this ruckus and the anguish looming among them, invited him to leave again and to never return to these lands.
His quest for truth was a failure, he found no home, he found no family and he found no answers neither. Alone, again, he sat beside the wall, the frontier of those lands, and tried to at least add a couple of new notes to his ongoing song.
When suddenly, a voice...
Personal ThoughtsWIPThere are so many things I could add here... And right now, I'm pretty frustrated : this moment here kinda illustrates something that I wanted to do for years, but not with images, nah, with music.
I laid the foundations for Kat's theme "song" over 20 years ago.
5 years ago, I also wrote Tiji's theme ; it's a rough theme that should be refined, but the core is nonetheless there.
And the thing I always dreamed to do was to merge them into one very unique song... Here too, I already have a couple of movements done, and a few years ago I even completed one section of it, "A Stolen Night"... but it's always the same issue : I'm not talented enough to master the tools I'm using, and everything I do is just... "poor", and begging to be improved by truly talented masters.
For years so, I've carried those ideas, those fragments of songs, those emotions, unable to find the right ways to express them.
And this render here is ultimately just another example of my frustration. I am illustrating the music... but it doesn't give me entire satisfaction I long for... It's just another layer of the same frustration...
But in some very interesting ways, it still manages to scratch this itch somehow. I mean, it is another layer of this frustration, but it is also another layer LESS and this ultimate truth is now a little bit more naked and vulnerable also.
Closer, but still not there.
So here there's Kat, plucking on his guitar... combining memories, combining flavors, pains and joys, playing the notes and tasting their colors. Nothing is perfect, nothing is entirely good, nothing is entirely bad neither. His music is just as him, lost, confused and lonely. Longing for companionship, for chaos, for another instrument to play along, and to make something better, and bigger than themselves.
Kat's music is emotional, intimate and hesitant, but there's also strength in it, and his rhythm -like the beating of a heart- gives the pace and provides the structure for better things to be built upon.
By himself, he has no purpose. There needs to be something else, something purer, something infinitely more fragile to cling to his notes, wrap it's body around it, give it life - like ivy on a dead wall.
Thus, enters Tiji, on the other side of this wall.
A few more interesting tidbits :
• Kat and music instruments, the eternal question -
I'm a keyboard player, but that's not the best instrument to carry or play in the wild, I mean, where do you get the electricity from, right ? For this reason, I considered plenty of instruments for Kat to play.
The oldest one I already had him play in the past : drums. This is the most authentic of all. Pure rhythm and it cannot get more tribal than this. When you play drums, everything becomes an instrument, even your neighbor's head when you're bored in a train.
There was also a time where I considered him to play a variety of wind instruments. 25 years ago, it was the pan flute. Later, inspired by an obvious & awkward reference, the ocarina : small, easy to carry around, pleasant sound. Kat can force himself through a melody, but it's not the instrument he favors.
And finally, the guitar... still my favorite instrument, and Kat shall be lucky where I was lazy : he does know how to play it, a little at least. The guitar is an amusing pick actually, as it is definitely NOT the most convenient to carry around. So he doesn't. Shall he ever want one, well, there are enough street musicians begging to be robbed. Obviously, he wouldn't use an electric guitar in my medieval world, but hey, he still managed to get one, don't ask me how he did that.
I usually prefer traditional guitars, yet there's one sound or play-style I'm particularly fond of and which only electric ones can achieve. It's this plucking sound that can be heard in the intro of this song. That's actually the only thing I truly love in that song, as it tends to become a bit too loud for my tastes later on, but eh. The intro, that pure guitar still makes it shine.
Fun fact, back then, when I wrote "A Stolen Night", I used a similar sound - but much softer and "intimate", and ideally, I would have loved to capture it on real instruments. And -deeper fun fact- back then, as I knew that she had a Fender, I asked her if she could play it... I would later have used her own audio in Tiji's song, which would have been a crazy feat/surprise, right ? But, well... Rifts opened in oceans, worlds, dimensions, times, hearts...
Update : I think I'm gonna order a guitar, found the perfect one and I'm really excited now !
• Regarding the pic itself, the background I finally chose wasn't entirely random.
I tried a few different things and environments, but many of those attempts didn't "work" as the barbed wire would often get drowned, and I wanted it to remain very visible.
That's when I had another idea, and I went with it to give the image some more "meta" depth.
I wanted an image of the other side of the world, to reinforce the idea that Kat had just traveled quite a lot. And I knew exactly which region I wanted to pinpoint here. A place that - just like Kat - I had once traveled to with the hopes to find a place to set new roots - and that would also be denied to me.
So I googled somewhat around, and then I came across an amazing gallery containing plenty of gorgeous landscapes of this environment.
Shenandoah National Park - simply breathtaking.
And so fascinating, as it looks so very much like the place he (and I) grew up in... but with new flavors of hope and joy.
Or ones that could have been, I suppose...
Update 2 : Hm, now that I'm throwing the follow up pic together, I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't have any good material of my one to use as a background image. I took so many photos of my travels, but so little of my actual stay, why ? Weird.
And well, it doesn't really matter, it's more of a symbolic thing anyway, as the background is barely visible and doesn't hold any value outside the one I am giving to it.
Tech Crap
note to self : i like this animation ! i should use it more often
update : maybe not that often...
update 2 :yay, i can even use it instead of the little yellow wip logo, that's better !
Oh wait no, let's use a wrench instead :
update 3 :
How bout a pepper ?
... OMG
I wanna make the most annoying sub description ever now !!
update 4 :
welp no, it makes the page lag too much... too bad
update 5 :hourglasses of course ! those make much more sense, lets see :
misc notes :
Can't really concentrate right now, waiting for a delivery, i ordered lots of cat food and i have NO idea at what hour the delivery will arrive, all i know is that it will be today, and this is driving me crazy i hate it... can't even go to the toilet cuz of the terror of the doorbell and missing the delivery...
also i need to go shopping and buy some cheese for a crazy meal idea i wanna do ! but i can't !
JUST GIVE ME A SOMEWHAT PRECISE TIME DAMNT ! I'M SURE YOU CAN BE MORE PRECISE THAN "sometime between 8am and 8pm", CAN'T YOU ?!
can't shower, can't go the toilet, can't do anything because of that fucking delivery, I HATE DELIVERIES !
... huh... i probably won't keep that in the story I think... -.-
... to the Todo !...
wip wip wip
mythology
The old war between the wolves and the foxes -
Wolves kept the allegiance to their Sacral whereas the foxes got tempted by the ways of the Sacral of the Human
"I want him gone", became the prayer.
So he ignored this display of passive hostility and circled closer, dared to walk deeper into their lands. If he couldn't find his answers in those smaller towns, then maybe the bigger ones were the places he should go ?
He knew what to expect : he already dealt with the rage of Man, and he assumed that the rage of Fox wouldn't be any different. So, once again, he became a creature of the night : he started to avoid the open roads, preferring the safety and the quietness of the woods. He became invisible, the only traces of his presence being his crimes, the little things he stole here or there.
And as he moved on, so grew the rumors about him.
"A wolf roams around... protect your sheep and protect your daughters".
And very soon, he was made the culprit of any wrongdoing that happened : thievery, animal slaughter, rape, murder.
Rumors grew insane, and so did the people.
"I want him dead", became the request.
he came to those lands to follow the steps of his ancestors... and so he did, and life goes on, they become the link, and the past lives on through them, through their children, instead of dying in aa selfish cold fire
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