“Fades Away” was the first song we did, I think. It was mainly based around Tim’s concept.
It started with the line “Don’t you love it how it all just fades away”, and he just loved that
idea and that line, and was like, “We should build a song around this”.
Tim played me a song as a reference song. It was a really fast song;
I think it was 137 bpm or something. He just said that “We should do the drop like this,
but then the song should be really slow, so it almost feels like a double tempo when the drop comes.”
We recorded rough vocals, and Tim was really the driving force with the lyrics and
the concept of the song. And that song was never finished, it was just this verse and chorus.
I just said to the other writers, “This is too good to leave unfinished so let’s do something with it”.
After working on it for a while I realized that maybe we should take this
riff that we have and do it with strings.
So that was the foundation, in a way.
I always liked that riff and I thought, “how can we make it work with another instrument?”
Which led to this.
I know Tim would have liked that, he always talked about big strings and orchestras,
and he always talked about voices. A big part of his sound was that he was obsessed with voices.
I thought, “What if it’s a girl singing it?”. We should only use people that knew Tim and
have worked with him before, and I just came up with the idea – “What if it’s Noonie Bao?”.
“I Could Be The One” was the first song that became big that I was a part of.
Before that, I was struggling for so many years in the studio. So that song
means a lot to me, because that’s the reason I can do this today.
That started the whole thing for me. I got an email and the songwriters
asked if I wanted to sing this song called “Fades Away”.
It was a really emotional day in the studio recording it.
It’s really beautiful, I’m happy they asked me to sing it.
With her vocals, the song headed in a different direction.
It became even more about the lyrics, more fragile, more honest,
and it’s also Tim’s words. I really felt like this was truly the right way to go.