Life Again The Journey Behind My New Sound and Album Story
Some albums come from a place you can name straight away. Others take their time. They sit with you, follow you through quiet mornings and long nights, and only make sense once you have lived enough to understand what they were trying to say.
Life Again is one of those albums.
When I made Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak, I was in a different headspace. That project carried a certain weight. It had the feel of late-night thoughts, pulled-up hoods, guarded emotions, and the kind of heartbreak that makes everything feel colder. It was honest, and I still stand by that honesty. But after releasing it, living with it, and seeing how people connected with it, I knew I could not simply make the same record twice.
I had changed. My life had shifted. My ears had opened to new sounds. My relationship with music felt different. I was no longer only writing from the middle of the wound. I was writing from the other side of it too.
That is where Life Again began.
Leaving one sound behind without losing myself
The hardest part of making a new album was not finding a different sound. It was allowing myself to change without feeling like I was abandoning what came before.
Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak had a clear emotional identity. It sat in the space between pain and protection. The title alone says a lot. Hats and hoodies are comfort items, but they can also be armour. They let you hide a little. They let you move through the world without giving too much away. Heartbreak was the thing underneath it all.
That project had a darker pulse. The writing came from survival mode. I was focused on what hurt, what was missing, and what lessons had been forced on me. The sound matched that mood. More shadow. More tension. More introspection.
With Life Again, I wanted air in the music.
Not softness for the sake of it. Not a forced happy ending. I wanted the album to feel like opening the curtains after keeping them closed for too long. Still aware of the past, but not trapped inside it.
That meant changing the textures. I leaned into warmer tones, fuller melodies, different rhythms, and a sense of movement. I wanted the songs to breathe. I wanted them to carry emotion, but also growth. The new sound came from that decision: to stop dressing every feeling in darkness and give some of them light.
The challenge was balance. If I went too far, the music would stop sounding like me. If I stayed too close to the old sound, I would be repeating myself. So I kept the core of who I am as a writer, the honesty, the direct emotion, the storytelling, and built a wider world around it.
Why the album is called Life Again
The title did not come from one single moment. It came from a feeling that kept returning while I was making the songs.
There are times when you do not realise you have been moving through life on autopilot until you finally feel present again. You laugh properly. You notice colour again. You hear music differently. You stop carrying every old conversation like it happened yesterday.
That is what Life Again means to me.
It is not about pretending everything became perfect. It is about realising that healing does not always arrive loudly. Sometimes it comes through small signs:
waking up without the same heaviness
enjoying your own company again
trusting your instincts after doubt
making peace with memories that used to sting
wanting to create from hope, not just pain
The album is built around that process. It moves through reflection, release, confidence, vulnerability, and renewal. Some songs still hold sadness, because life does not become clean overnight. But sadness no longer controls the whole room.
That was important to me. I did not want to make a project that erased the past. I wanted to show what happens after it.
The journey through the songs
Every song on Life Again has its own place in the story. I thought about the album less like a playlist and more like a walk through different rooms of the same house. Each room carries a different light, but they all belong together.
The opening songs
The first set of songs are a reminder of the pain I was once in, looking at how I could have done things differently in those times, or if there was a way to fix my own pain, they act as the bridge between Hats, Hoodies and Heartbreak, and the sound i intended for life again.
As we move through to the second act, you can hear a distinct change in styles, a moment when life began again, finding a person that pulled me through, helped me recover and grow from what pain had been rooted in me. I explored this sound on several occasions, sharing a story that was fulfilling, personal, and changed me for the better.
Ending the whole album are three songs that are meant to be discomforting, signaling what is to come, two very angry tracks based on political findings, and one very light folks style song about my heritage. A disjointed set no doubt, but with intention. It is also part of life happening again, how people are feeling fed up of the same things happening across the globe that are directly effecting our lives.
What pushed me towards a different sound
The new sound did not happen because I sat down and decided to chase a trend. It came from life changing around me and inside me.
After Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak, I kept asking myself what I wanted the next chapter to feel like. I knew I wanted growth, but growth can be hard to translate into sound. It is easy to write pain because pain speaks loudly. Healing is quieter. Hope can be more difficult to describe without making it sound flat or fake.
So I started paying attention to feeling.
If a beat made me stand differently, I followed that. If a melody felt like fresh air, I stayed with it. If a lyric felt too safe, I rewrote it. I stopped trying to protect the old mood and started asking what each song needed.
That opened the door to new choices:
More space in the production, so the emotion could sit naturally
Warmer sounds, to reflect a different season of life
Stronger melodies, because some feelings needed to be sung through
More movement, to show that the story was no longer stuck
Cleaner emotional focus, so each song knew what it wanted to say
The result is an album that still has depth, but carries more light. It is not a complete break from my past sound. It is an expansion.
I think that matters. Artists grow best when they do not throw everything away, but they also do not let their past become a cage.
The role of honesty in both albums
Even though Life Again sounds different, honesty is still the thread that connects it to Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak.
I do not want to make music that feels polished but empty. I would rather leave a rough edge in if it carries truth. Listeners can tell when something has been overworked until the feeling disappears. The goal was not perfection. The goal was connection.
On Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak, honesty sounded guarded. It felt like telling the truth while still keeping one hand on the door. On Life Again, honesty sounds more open. It lets people in a little more. It says what happened, but it also says what came after.
That is the biggest difference between the two projects.
One was about weathering the storm. The other is about stepping outside afterwards, looking around, and realising the world is still there.
What I learnt while making Life Again
Making this album taught me that change does not have to be dramatic to be real. Sometimes the biggest creative shifts happen through small decisions repeated over time.
A different drum pattern. A brighter chord. A vocal take that feels less controlled. A lyric that admits something without dressing it up. Those choices add up. Before long, the whole world of the album starts to feel different.
I also learnt that fear often shows up when you are close to something honest. There were moments when I questioned whether the sound was too different. I wondered if people would understand the shift. I wondered if I should lean back into what felt familiar.
But comfort is not always a sign that something is right. Sometimes comfort just means you have been there before.
The more I listened to the songs together, the more I understood what the album was becoming. It was not running away from my earlier work. It was answering it.
Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak asked, “How do I survive this?”
Life Again answers, “I survived, and now I want to live.”
What I hope listeners take from the album
I hope people hear the growth in the music. I hope they hear the risk too. Changing sound can feel exposed, especially when listeners have connected with a previous project. But I would rather be honest about where I am now than repeat a feeling that no longer fully represents me.
More than anything, I hope Life Again gives people room to feel their own change.
If you have gone through a hard season, you may recognise the earlier part of the journey. If you are in the middle of rebuilding, you may hear yourself in the conflict. If you are starting to feel like yourself again, I hope the album meets you there.
Music has always helped me understand my own life. Sometimes I write a song because I know exactly what I feel. Other times I write because I am trying to find out. This album holds both.
It is personal, but it is not closed off. Once it belongs to listeners, the songs take on new meanings. People attach them to their own memories, their own healing, their own fresh starts. That is one of the most beautiful parts of releasing music.
A new chapter, not a final answer
Life Again is not the end of the story. It is a marker. It captures where I am now, what I have come through, and what I am ready to explore next.
I am proud of Hats Hoodies and Heartbreak because it told the truth of that time. I am proud of Life Again because it tells the truth of this one.
The sound has changed because I have changed. The writing has opened up because life has opened up. The songs still carry emotion, but they are no longer standing in the same shadow.
That is the heart of the album.
To anyone who has listened already, thank you for stepping into this new chapter with me. To anyone about to hear it for the first time, I hope you give it space. Let it play from the beginning. Let the story move. Let the songs speak to each other.
There is heartbreak in the past, but there is life after it.
And this is what it sounds like when I find it again.
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