“On the Air” is the final song on my EP. It abstractly represents the conclusion of the themes of the EP as a whole, where after everything we find our main character tipped back in his chair, taking in the static while refusing any outside help… completely resigned to his fate. Out of all the songs on the EP, this was by far the most difficult to write. I spent several straight months agonizing over every little detail of the songwriting, and the melody, to try and create something that captured the scene I had in my head. 

 

“On the Air” originally developed musically out of one of the scrapped songs that I was thinking about using to follow up “Dead Sound on the Radio” with called “Blue Light” (the verse of which developed into another scrapped song called “Open Cage”). The original intention behind “Blue Light” was for it to be a very spaced out ambient ballad (like a not instrumental version of Steven Wilson’s “The Harmony Codex”) about the feeling of zoning out, and ignoring the outside world. However, after I spent a while trying to get the song to work, I felt I couldn’t get the melody or lyrics to be compelling. Plus, I realized I liked the chorus chords (a progression of Am-Dadd4/A-Am-Esus4) better in isolation than as a chorus. So, I scrapped the entire verse and all of the lyrics + melody in favor of writing a song around just the former chorus chords.

 

The main thing I wanted to do with “On the Air”—because I hadn’t decided how I wanted to musically end the EP—was try to include a reprise of the “switch off the radio” section from “Dead Sound on the Radio”. From around the time I wrote “Snake Oil” (summer 2025) I knew I wanted the EP to end with the click of someone switching off a radio, proceeded by a swell of sounds heard in the opening sound collage. So, I wanted to try and pair that with a reprise of the bridge chord progression from “Dead Sound” to give the EP’s music some amount of closure on top of closing out the radio concept. Because of this, after scrapping the verse of “Blue Light”, I also moved the progression up to start on C#m so I could incorporate the “Switch Off the Radio” section easier, and bookend the EP with it.

 

In the original draft of the song (from before O and I recorded it), the reprise at the end was much more prominent than in the final version as well. Instead of playing the third chorus, followed by a quiet guitar part, I originally brought back the Switch Off the Radio section in full after the guitar solo. Owen quickly informed me that this did not work nearly as well as I thought it did, and in hindsight he was right. It came across as incredibly cheesy once I got out of my own head about it, so we brought back the chorus a third time to close the song out in a much better, much more bleak way.

 

The melody for “On the Air” took a couple months to get it to where I wanted it, and the lyrics took even longer. The verse melody came together slowly over the course of a couple months, mainly as a peripheral thing. In the earliest drafts of the song, I was hell bent on the idea of writing a pre-chorus for the song, because I’d never tried to write one before and I wanted to give it a shot. This was, in hindsight, a genuinely awful idea. I spent a truly staggering amount of time writing, re-writing and editing different melodies for a pre chorus—all of which I scrapped once I realized the verse and chorus were stronger on their own than with a pre chorus; all the while constantly going back and forth with tweaking the verse melody over and over in small pieces in between modifying “Open Cage”.

 

I also spent a truly ludicrous amount of time writing the lyrics of the song because I got obsessive over the exact imagery I wanted to use for the verses and choruses, and because I was trying to write the melody and lyrics at the same time, which didn’t help. The whole time I was also progressively getting more and more fed up with the song. It got so bad that I was still nitpicking what the chorus words should be while O’ and I were recording the song. We had to do multiple takes of the chorus vocals because I kept changing the words in between takes. 

 

I don’t have specific set examples of completed drafts unfortunately, as while I was writing I kept (metaphorically) tearing previous drafts apart, reorganizing and editing them until the word docs (because there were multiple) became long intangible scrawls of phrases, repeating at sort of random intervals. They were also all mixed with different attempts at word association, as I was trying to come up with new imagery to replace scrapped parts that weren’t working. This would continue until I got so overwhelmed that I’d start the process over with a new word doc, only including the pieces I thought were kind of working from the previous one. 

 

    Here are some examples of sections of scrapped lyrics from some of the word docs:

 

  Scrap 1:

  This was an early draft of verse lyrics before I had any idea of what the chorus of the song would be.

        Verse 1

    “Warm light tips through blinds

    Static swirls the air

    Blue light paints your face a mellow hue

    A sinking lonely flare

 

    Piles grow to fill the corners of the room

    You don’t seem to care

    Building shadows on your throne

    Your aching chair

    I hope you know you’re not alone”

    

        Verse 2

    “Winding dust against the creeping light

    The whispers sell their wares

    Seven dollars for a purple pint

    To unwind your snare

    you don’t seem to care”

 

The original intent for this version was for every verse to end in “I hope you know you’re not alone.”

 

Scrap 2:

This was an incredibly long attempt at writing a chorus from before I’d settled on the song’s chorus melody. I was trying to come up with a melody at the same time as I wrote the lyrics, and it did not go very well. 

        

        Chorus

    “Memory melds 

    Time slides through the air

    You’re Slipped into a slow snare

    I watch your head spill over

 

    In the spiral of a dream

    Sewing shut the seam

    you throw away the sky

    You never even tried…

 

    you refused the line”

 

Scrap 3:

This was another attempt at writing the chorus melody and words at the same time, so the structure of the words changed from the previous one. Once again, it didn’t result in anything I was happy with.

 

        Chorus 1

    “The water biting colder

    Gnawing right up to your shoulder

    crawling up your spine

 

    And You refused the line”

 

        Chorus 2

    “Never had a purpose. 

    Never took aim for a future

    Couldn’t find the sky

 

    And you refused to try

 

    Waking hours Linger

    until daylight threads it’s fingers 

    ‘Round the shuttered blinds

 

    eyes dull and wide

    you refused the line”

 

Scrap 4:

This is from when I started to piece together what the final chorus melody would be. this draft (among the many others) were really wordy for a chorus, so I kept trimming them back until I hit the final rhythm and stress pattern for the chorus lyrics.

 

        Chorus

    “And I watched you 

    Resigned

    I watched you 

    lose the surface

    I watched you 

    Waiting on the world

 

    I watched you refuse the line.”

 

After a number of re-writes, I ultimately returned to something resembling what’s listed as “Scrap 1” here for the verses. I got so frustrated with the whole song that I took whatever verse ideas were the most complete—and that were working in isolation—strung them all together, and called the lyrics done. Then, because I had pretty much figured out the chorus melody (but not the specific words) I sat down with O’ to record the song. 

 

We recorded “On the Air” in late December 2025 spread out over a couple weeks. The parts I remember most about recording was re-doing vocal tracks over and over because of my obsessive lyric editing, as well as O’ having me re-record the chord progression/fingerpicking part over and over on essentially every guitar we own to layer everything together. The entire process was extremely meticulous. 

 

The moment during recording when the whole song kind of clicked for me was when O’ sat down and recording a harmony for my guitar part on his eight string during the instrumental after the first chorus. When he played it back, it sounded like the song had taken a deep breath in, and then began to bloom. It was really beautiful.

 

Before mixing and mastering the whole EP in May and June of 2026, O’ went back and re-recorded the guitar parts to different parts of “On the Air” (particularly on the second chorus, where he changed the guitar pretty drastically so it no longer matched the first chorus). He gave the song a stronger sense of progression in doing so, and ultimately made it a lot better than in the initial version. After O’s second round of edits, we called it done.