The Boy in a Tower

“The Boy in a Tower” is the second song on my “On the Air” EP. Lyrically it’s a brief character sketch of the kind of kid I was during my early teenage years, and into high school. I was shy, quiet, creative, and had a small group of close friends who I knew from grade school that I did pretty much everything with. Plus, partially because of the pandemic, and partially because I was just shy, I barely left the house (I was homeschooled for context). I spent most of my non-school time either playing Monster Hunter, playing my guitar, or writing for my D&D setting, building mounds of metaphorical paper scraps.

“The Boy in a Tower” really didn’t go through many stages developmentally. The whole song came together in a couple of hours in November or December of 2025. I wrote the words and chords in an hour and a half, and the instrumentation was almost entirely done by Owen on the same day. The only instrument I played on the recorded version of the song was the main synth/keyboard part. The entire rest of the song was Owen’s creation. 

Despite the fact that “The Boy in a Tower” was written incredibly quickly, it took me a long time to arrive at the song. Songwriting is a fickle thing. Sometimes you spend months on a song that barely works, sometimes you write a good one in 15 minutes, and there’s no way to know which one any specific song is. For song two on the EP, I knew in my head that I heard the specific rhythm of “The Boy in a Tower”’s opening drum part following up “Dead Sound” whenever I listened to it, but every time I tried to write something around that rhythm it didn’t fit. 

I actually abandoned the rhythm entirely for a period of time in favor of a ballad called “Open Cage.” It was supposed to be about a little bird too afraid to use its wings, stuck in an open cage as the winter rolled in. It never got past the first verse/chorus, but I really liked the chord progression. I won’t post any of the audio and lyrics for “Open Cage” here though, because I don’t want it to get scraped by AI before I’ve even had time to finish the song. If I ever do circle back to it for any reason, I’ll link it here retroactively.

I ended up scrapping open cage because it didn’t follow up “Dead Sound” very well, and the melody was just not working. I also couldn’t come up with a solid set of lyrics for the second verse, which didn’t help. So, I came back to the “The Boy in a Tower” drum beat on the same day O’ and I had scheduled time to work on material (with the original plan being to record “Open Cage”). I spent a good chunk of the day trying to write a solid second verse for “Open Cage”, before I realized it wasn’t working. So, 2 hours before we sat down to record, I hammered out a chord progression to the beat I heard following up “Dead Sound”, and came up with a simple melody and lyrics on the spot, with thirty minutes to spare! Then I brought it to O’, and he completely transformed my hastily thrown together sketch into the final version of “The Boy in a Tower.”

Art and Design:

There was exactly one version of the “The Boy in a Tower “artwork, and it was the final one. The art was actually one of a couple little doodles I made in 2026 while testing out some of the new brushes Procreate had added in a big update. There isn’t much more to say about it really. I doodled it while experimenting around the GYB logo with the new brushes, and then I had the song art. I really wish it was more purposeful than that, but the doodle pretty much perfectly fit the song in my head, so I kept it.

Here’s a time lapse of it for anyone interested.