What is “your” song?

Not your favorite song. Not the one you put on at dinner parties, or the one that makes you cry at weddings.

I mean the other one. The one you reach for when something in you has slipped, when you’re too flat, too wound up, too stuck. The one that lifts you without explaining itself. The one that doesn’t ask you anything. The one that works.

I’m sure everyone has one. You might even have a few.

That’s your Anthem.

Anthem — a medicine for the mood

There’s a specific kind of magic that happens in the first eight seconds of the right song.

You’re dragging. Staring at the same email. Vaguely annoyed at nothing. And then the song starts, and something in your body responds before your brain even registers what’s playing. Your shoulders drop, or maybe they lift. Your pace changes. Something shifts.

Music doesn’t just accompany mood. It moves it. A 2013 psychological survey found that one of the top reasons people listen to music is specifically to regulate mood and manage stress, more than for background noise, more than for social connection. We reach for music the way we once reached for ritual: deliberately, personally, and with a kind of belief that it will do something to us.

Not metaphor. Medicine.

That’s the Anthem.

Why Anthem, and why now

We switch moods more than we think, multiple times a day, in small invisible tilts. A frustrating meeting. An interaction that lands wrong. A good coffee. An art piece that gets to you.

For women going through perimenopause or menopause (Hello, fellow ladies!), this volatility can be amplified significantly. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that about 4 in 10 women experience mood symptoms during perimenopause, including irritability, low energy, tearfulness, and difficulty concentrating, with no predictable pattern... Four in ten? I suspect the real number is much higher. We’re not always great at reporting what we quietly endure.

How you steady yourself feel less like self-care, and more like necessity.

Barack Obama rapped Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” at a Detroit rally in October 2024, grinning the entire time. A song about not wasting the moment in front of you. About showing up when it counts.

Serena Williams, walking onto Centre Court at Wimbledon to win her sixth title, sang the Flashdance theme to herself to manage her nerves. The song wasn’t a celebration. It was putting on her armor.

My husband has his too. Before closing big deals, he used to play “I Have the Touch” by Peter Gabriel, loud. Something about that song was getting him into the state he needed. It worked too many times to think it’s coincidence.

And me? I have two.

When I’m stressed or spinning, it’s “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley. It bypasses the part of my brain that argues back and goes straight to the part that still knows how to breathe. My favorite version isn’t the original. It’s a little boy, maybe five years old, singing it on YouTube with absolute conviction, swaying slightly. If you haven’t seen it, look at it now. You are welcome.

The other one is “Cheers (Drink to That)” by Rihanna. The first on my Friday evenings playlist when I was still working long, grinding corporate weeks. This is not a subtle one. No apologies.

How do you make an anthem?

The mood for this drop started in that moment when the right song finds you, at the right time.

You start in the bleh: flat, low-grade, not sad exactly, just off.

You scroll your playlist without knowing what you need. And then it hits. That’s the first verse.

Verse two is the moment it lands: something in your body responds before your mind catches up. The shift happens before you understand it. I stitched a few familiar echoes into the lyrics: the touch that changes everything, three little birds, a toast.

The bridge goes somewhere more direct: music as a fast, side-effect-free prescription for whatever ailment is affecting you.

Musically, I started with something warm and island-inflected, reggae undertones, loose rhythm, late-afternoon ease. But that left me in the bleh.

As I worked through iterations, the mood demanded something sharper. More present. Less retreat, more arrival. What emerged is closer to pop with a bit of funk underneath, maybe a little bit of Prince, a sprinkle of Nile Rodgers, something with groove, confidence, and a forward lean. An anthem, by nature, isn’t wistful. It carries you forward.

Anthem.

Putting Anthem in a frame

I wanted the image to hold the before and the after at the same time. The dark, and the thing that brings it to light.

I have a piece of Damien Hirst’s pharmacy wallpaper framed at home. I’ve always liked it: medication as wallpaper, healing as decoration. Hirst once said “Art is a hell of a lot better for you than medicine…”. I can’t agree more.

The dark background came from the Dutch masters. They painted ordinary objects in near-darkness, a single light catching amber glass and half-eaten things. The contrast between the warmth of the objects against the shadows felt exactly right for this mood. The before.

An amber prescription bottle on its side, white cap off, earbuds spilling out onto a wooden surface. Take as needed.

Painted like something worth looking at slowly.

Anthem.

The Rx

🎧 Listen to “Anthem” on SoundCloud

🖼 Download the visuals on Google Drive

✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

🌐 Visit my website

💿 Listen to the Mood Drops playlist

What’s your Anthem?

These things are more personal than people let on, and I think that’s exactly why they matter.

Tell me which song you reach for when your mood needs adjusting. Leave it in a comment or send me a message.

Leave a comment

Stay tuned

If you haven’t subscribed yet, it’s free and you’ll be the first to receive the next drop.

Elsewhere as a mood

You step out of the daily flow, work, responsibilities, and the constant pull on your attention, not to fix it or resist it, but simply to be out of it for a moment.

What’s striking is that nothing changes when you leave. The same messages keep arriving, the same loops keep running, everything continues.

You’re just no longer participating in it, and that distance, even a small one, changes how you relate to it.

Elsewhere is where you land when you step out, still aware of everything, just no longer inside it.

You always bring something back, even if it’s just a different way of seeing.

Why Elsewhere, and why now

Most of the time, things don’t slow down.

Work keeps moving, messages keep coming, expectations are already set, and you’re fully inside it.

That’s usually when I step out for a bit, not because things are done, but because they aren’t.

Elsewhere doesn’t happen when things stop. It happens when they don’t.

Before leaving, there’s always an attempt to get ahead of things, closing loops, anticipating issues, frontloading as much as possible so the absence feels contained. It never fully works. Nothing really pauses.

A while ago, I had a project scheduled just before a vacation. It got delayed enough to create uncertainty, so I checked in with my boss.

She didn’t hesitate. “The shit will wait for you. Go.”

It did.

A small moment

Recently, I was on public transportation when a teenager offered me his seat, something I didn’t expect.

After I sat down, he asked me, “What advice would you give to a young man like me?”

I didn’t think very long.

Travel! Go to places you don’t know, where you don’t understand the language and can’t rely on your usual reference points.

That’s Elsewhere.

Everything stays the same, but it changes how you experience it. You notice small shifts in smells, sounds, and pace, in places where your usual shortcuts don’t apply.

It slows your responses, you observe more, interpret less, and the weight of what you stepped away from starts to loosen.

You come back with more than you left with.

Giving Elsewhere a story and a sound

What does that shift sound like?

It’s not defensive, and it’s not aggressive. It doesn’t push back or try to resolve anything. It stays close to the surface while everything else keeps moving.

The track is slow and grounded, with guitars that blur into the background, repeating just enough to hold it together. There’s drift, but not weightlessness. Something still anchors it. The rhythm marks time more than it drives.

Underneath, there’s a simple arc. A beginning where you step out, a middle where you experience Elsewhere, and a return where everything you left is still there.

The only shift is you.

For the lyrics, I spent some time reading Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison, focusing on oxytones, structure, and writing through the senses, letting images and small details do the work. The lyrics stay real close to what’s happening.

The voice sits inside the mix, carried by the melody rather than leading it. It doesn’t push forward or try to command attention. It moves with the track, almost like another layer passing through, close enough to follow, but never insisting on being heard.

The track carries you elsewhere, and leaves everything else where it was.

Giving Elsewhere a look

I wanted an image to hold that same in-between space.

Something that still feels like a landscape, but not entirely anchored in reality. A horizon you recognize, but can’t quite place. Light doing more work than structure.

I kept coming back to the way J.M.W. Turner lets light dissolve the world. In The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, form gives way, and what remains is motion, light, and a sense of being inside it rather than looking at it.

I was also drawn to the kind of distance you find in Gerhard Richter’s Seascape. A barely blurred horizon where everything is still there, familiar, but not fully accessible.

For Elsewhere, I wanted the light to break across the image. Circular flares, almost like raindrops hitting a lens, catching and scattering light. The kind of photo you take without meaning to, where something interrupts the view and alters how the scene comes through.

Not a distortion exactly.

More like a filter you didn’t choose.

That’s where this image sits. Not abstract. Not fully real.

A space where structure is still present, but loosens just enough for something else to emerge. Where light softens edges, and distance changes how things are perceived.

You’re looking at the same world. Just not from the same place.

Elsewhere.

Why this is the fifth Mood Drop

These drops weren’t planned as a sequence. But looking back, they seem to build on each other.

Possibility opened something.

Resonance aligned it.

Renew pushed it forward.

Enough marked the point where it all becomes too much.

Elsewhere comes after that.

Not as a reaction, but as a shift in position. Stepping out of what’s been building, just long enough to see it differently.

Downloads & listening

Listen to Elsewhere below, download the visuals, and read the lyrics.

If you’d like a copy of the track (MP3, FLAC, WAV), just ask.

• 🎧 Listen to “Elsewhere” on SoundCloud

• 🖼️ Download the visuals on Google Drive

• ✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

• 🌐 Visit my website

• 💿 Listen to the Mood Drops playlist

Take it with you

Step out.

And if you want to share where Elsewhere takes you, I’d love to hear.

The project is free to subscribe. One mood, one drop, once a month, in your inbox.

It will still be there.

Leave a comment

What is this?

The Mood Drops is a monthly creative series: one mood, explored through a song and a visual artifact. Each drop stands on its own — no genre, no storyline, no rush toward resolution. Just a feeling, examined from a few angles, and released quietly once a month.

You can read more about the experiment here.

Enough as a mood

I almost made something light.

April and its fool felt like the right excuse: something a bit absurd, maybe even funny. A track that doesn’t linger, just lifts the surface for a few minutes.

I tried to push it there.

It didn’t hold.

The more I forced it, the more it felt out of sync. Not wrong, just disconnected from what’s actually present right now. There’s a kind of saturation in the background. Economic pressure, political friction, environmental anxiety, wars, mental fatigue. Constant.

Hard to ignore. Hard to turn into something playful.

So I stopped trying and followed what was already there.

Enough.

The mood taking shape

This mood isn’t just mine. It’s not tied to a moment. It accumulates.

You notice it in conversations. In tone. In how quickly patience runs out. In how little space there is between reaction and exhaustion.

It doesn’t necessarily come out cleanly.

So the track doesn’t try to clean it up.

It stays close to the impulse. Direct. Repetitive. Almost explosive.

Finding the sound

The first versions of this song leaned into weight.

Distorted guitars, long reverbs. Something closer to rock. It made sense conceptually, but it diffused the energy. It spread instead of landing.

What I needed was tighter. More contained. More immediate.

I kept coming back to that feeling — when something gives, when it cracks and spills. Words don’t come out because they’re shaped, but because they have to.

Fast. Loud. Percussive.

That’s where it shifted. Toward rap. Toward that kind of release.

I kept thinking about Eminem’s Lose Yourself. That proximity between feeling and delivery. The song has been on my training playlist for years — especially when kickboxing — and that same energy felt right here.

Punches and kicks. No distance. No filter.

Short lines. Sharp rhythm.

Less explanation. More tension.

It is delivered with a slight accent, not mine. That’s intentional. It reflects how I experience this as an immigrant.

That extra layer. Same signals, different distance.

Enough.

The visual layer

A mashup of references. Take it or leave it.

First, chaos.

I thought of The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch — the way multiple situations coexist without hierarchy. Not one scene, but many, happening at once. The way paradise shifts to hell.

Then, layering.

Julie Mehretu — lines, paths, systems intersecting. Nothing fully aligned, everything still active, sometimes overwhelming. I saw her work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2021, and later at SFMOMA.

What came out is an image that holds a kind of collision — layers of lines, fragments of structure, and scattered figures all moving at once, without alignment.

Small human forms appear throughout, some folding inward, some pushing against invisible pressure, some rising. It’s not chaos for its own sake — it’s what happens when too many signals, constraints, and forces overlap for too long.

The moment where strain asks for a response.

Enough.

Why this is the fourth Mood Drop

Possibility opened something.

Resonance aligned it.

Renew pushed it forward.

Enough is what happens when it stops holding.

No clean transition. Just a point where continuing the same way doesn’t feel viable.

Downloads & listening options

Like the previous drops, here are a few things you can take with you, shared for personal enjoyment (not commercial use).

You’ll find three downloadable JPEGs based on the Enough artwork:

• Wide (16:9) for desktop

• Vertical (9:16) for phones

• Square (1:1) for wherever squares belong

The listening link here is a private MP3 stream on SoundCloud. If you’d like a downloadable version (MP3, FLAC, or WAV), ask — happy to send it.

Don’t keep it in

If this hits, you’re probably feeling it too.

Add your context in comments or messages — we could all use a bit more humanity right now.

The project is free to subscribe. One mood, one drop, once a month, in your inbox.

• 🎧 Listen to “Enough” on SoundCloud

• 🖼️ Download the visuals on Google Drive

• ✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

• 🌐 Visit my website

Don’t stay quiet.

Leave a comment

What is this?

The Mood Drops is a monthly creative series: one mood, explored through a song and a visual artifact. Each drop stands on its own — no genre, no storyline, no rush toward resolution. Just a feeling, examined from a few angles, and released quietly once a month.

You can read more about the experiment here.

Renew as a mood

Renew doesn’t feel calm — it feels charged, like something gathering energy beneath the surface before it finally moves.

Something loosens and then accelerates, the way pressure finds direction once it can’t stay contained any longer. (Think champagne!)

You don’t become someone else; you become a version that was already there, just waiting underneath.

Renew isn’t rest — it’s release.

Why Renew, and why March

March is a hinge between seasons… where the Ides of March gives way to the rite of spring… the month where spring begins to press against winter’s edge. The calendar says transition, even when the weather may hesitate.

Spring gets framed as gentle: buds, light, soft air returning, but renewal rarely feels delicate from the inside.

It feels closer to shedding — not a bear leaving hibernation, but a snake slipping out of its skin. The old form still recognizable, but no longer wearable. You don’t repair it. You outgrow it.

The rhythm changes first, almost imperceptibly. Then suddenly, what fit yesterday resists today.

That’s what Renew feels like.

The mood finding a pulse

The words, the sound, and the image for this drop began to move together.

Renew begins as a pulse — faster, brighter, almost trance-like.

I want something physical. Something the body understands before language does. A track that doesn’t ask for reflection, but for participation.

Less atmosphere, more propulsion.

Getting there was laborious. I kept adjusting tempo, density, the way the hook returned… searching for the moment where movement stops feeling optional.

Every shift in the beat forced the words to move too. When the phrasing said too much, the groove broke. When the rhythm tightened, the lines had to shorten to survive inside it.

The music and the lyrics collaborated until meaning followed motion, not the other way around.

It took me 153 iterations before everything locked: if you know Suno (one of AI tools, my Amis Imaginaires), you know that means twice as many versions as it sounds like.

The words didn’t end up describing the feeling — they became part of the mechanism creating it.

Reduced. Repeated. Physical.

Renewal isn’t a single change… it’s a process… It’s a loop you move through, step after step, beat after beat.

Renew.

The pulse finding a shape

The visual creation kept pace with the music.

I knew it couldn’t be calm. But I also didn’t want destruction. Renewal isn’t breaking — it’s emergence through release.

The image formed through a strange convergence of references.

I kept returning to Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus — a bit about the mythology, but more about the composition: a central figure entering a new state, ceremonially held by the space around it.

But renewal, for me, didn’t feel like a birth. It felt messier, more physical, more immediate.

Another influence entered: Jackson Pollock’s Convergence. Paint not as depiction, but as event.

Energy captured mid-release.

Motion performing transformation.

The palette needed to push everything further. Not the pastel language of early bloom, but high-contrast, high-voltage. Colors as energy.

Neon magenta, saturated and almost feverish. Electric cyan cutting through it. Flashes of molten gold against near-black. Colors that don’t whisper spring but pulse like a dance floor at midnight. Not daylight awakening, but something incandescent and internal. The kind of light that comes from friction, from movement, from heat, from bodies in motion.

So instead of emerging from water, the figure breaks out of itself.

Color bursts outward like pressure finally given permission — discarding what no longer matches the tempo.

Renew.

Why this is the third Mood Drop

Possibility was taking a step. Resonance was finding alignment.

Renew is what happens when movement becomes release.

It isn’t clarity so much as motion — the realization that the ground has shifted and you’re no longer standing where you were.

Downloads & listening options

Like the previous drops, here are a few things you can take with you, shared for personal enjoyment (not commercial use).

You’ll find three downloadable JPEGs based on the Renew artwork:

• Wide (16:9) for desktop

• Vertical (9:16) for phones

• Square (1:1) for wherever squares belong

The listening link here is a private MP3 stream on SoundCloud. If you’d like a downloadable version (MP3, FLAC, or WAV), ask — happy to send it.

Carry the energy forward

If this drop gives you even a flicker of energy, pass it on, and please, tell me. Comments and messages are part of the rhythm, too.

This project is free to subscribe to — new moods land in your inbox every month.

🎧 Listen to “Renew” on Soundcloud

🖼️ Download the visuals on Google Drive

✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

🌐 Visit my website

No reflection required: press play and feel what happens.

Leave a comment

What is this?

The Mood Drops is a monthly creative series: one mood, explored through a song and a visual artifact. Each drop stands on its own — no genre, no storyline, no rush toward resolution. Just a feeling, examined from a few angles, and released quietly once a month.

You can read more about the experiment here.

Resonance as a mood

Resonance feels like alignment without effort. Two rhythms finding the same tempo.

It’s not perfection or agreement. It’s harmony: difference without friction, movement that doesn’t collide.

It’s the moment you realize you’re not adjusting your pace, but simply walking beside someone who moves the same way.

Resonance isn’t loud. But once you feel it, you know.

Why Resonance, and why February

February almost demands that we talk about love.

Valentine’s Day brings its familiar choreography: hearts, roses, carefully curated gestures, algorithms reminding us that romance is in season. It’s lovely, and many people genuinely enjoy it. But I’ve always been more interested in what exists beneath the surface of those rituals.

Not love as spectacle.

Not love as expectation.

Not love as something you have to live up to.

What fascinates me is the quieter, deeper thing: the way two people fall into rhythm without negotiating it. The way conversation turns into music. The way being together feels less like effort and more like breathing.

That is where resonance lives.

In sound. In motion. In vibration.

In frequencies that amplify each other rather than compete.

In physics, resonance happens when waves align and reinforce each other. In human relationships, something similar occurs. When you’re not on the same wavelength, things collapse. When you are, they expand. Connection, in that sense, is less about intention and more about attunement.

From mood to sound

For the first Mood Drop, Possibility, the image arrived first, and the song followed. This time, it happened in reverse.

Resonance began as a sound.

I was looking for a melody that would feel conversational rather than declarative. Not a back-and-forth, but a duet slowly finding its balance. Something ambient, dreamy, quietly sensual — like dancing with someone for the first time and suddenly realizing your steps match, your bodies agree, your rhythms quietly converging.

But here’s the thing: resonance is hard to pull off solo. You can’t really resonate… with yourself.

So I brought in the magnetic, always-in-the-pocket Biff T. Johnson — who you might recognize from my Christmas song.

The song opens with the female voice (Lili’s), setting the tone, feeling its way into the space. Then the second voice joins (Biff T.’s). Not to interrupt or respond, but to slip into the same wavelength.

From there, the voices alternate, overlap, move in parallel. They don’t argue. They don’t explain. They speak the same emotional language. They finish each other’s phrases, reinforce each other’s lines, merge into harmony — not as performance, but as recognition.

It isn’t conversation. It’s synchronization.

Two presences learning how to breathe in the same rhythm.

And then came the image

When the sound found its rhythm, I started looking for its image. And that turned out to be the hardest part.

I struggled more than I expected. Usually, visuals pop easily into my mind. This time, they didn’t. I went through more iterations than I care to admit — working on draft after draft, testing compositions, styles, palettes, textures. Nothing quite felt right. Too literal. Too cold. Too decorative. Too flat.

I knew the image had to carry the same underlying pulse as the music, and for a while, I couldn’t find it.

I didn’t know what I wanted. But I knew what I didn’t want.

Not a narrative scene.

Not something literal.

I began looking outward, gathering visual languages that could suggest vibration, alignment, without spelling anything out. Op Art, with its concentric circles and rippling lines. Panography, where a single image is built from overlapping fragments, slightly shifted in time and space. And Kandinsky’s abstract compositions, where color and form become emotion rather than illustration.

I was drawn to anything that could hold motion without turning it into a story.

When it finally worked, I knew immediately. My shoulders dropped. I stopped tweaking.

What emerged was an abstract, mixed-media image, grounded in this project’s emotional logic. Two mirrored, humanoid figures face each other. They feel related, like variations of the same form, yet subtly distinct. They hover just short of contact, suspended in that charged space where connection happens.

Between them, concentric lines radiate outward. Ripples. Sound waves. Shared vibration.

Resonance.

Why this is the second Mood Drop

Possibility, the first Mood Drop, was about movement. About taking a step without certainty. About choosing motion over hesitation.

Resonance is about what happens after that step.

About meeting someone, finding something, or some rhythm that matches you. About realizing that you don’t need to recalibrate yourself in this space. That you don’t need to translate your instincts. That you can simply exist as you are, in sync. It is the relief of being understood without explanation.

It shows up in romantic relationships, in friendships, in conversations that stretch into the night, in collaborations that feel effortless.

That felt like the right next chapter for this project.

Not louder. Not bigger. Maybe a little deeper.

Downloads & listening options

Like the previous drop, this one comes with a few things you can take with you, shared for personal enjoyment, not for commercial use.

You’ll find three downloadable JPEGs based on the Resonance artwork:

• Wide (16:9) — for desktop backgrounds

• Vertical (9:16) — sized for phone lock screens or wallpapers

• Square (1:1) — for wherever square things live.

The listening link here (and above) is a private, lightweight MP3 stream on SoundCloud. If you’d like a downloadable version of the song (MP3, FLAC, or WAV), just reach out and I’ll be happy to provide.

Do this for me

If this mood found you at the right moment, do tell me.

Comments, messages, or quiet shares are my oxygen for this project.

If you’d like to stay close, subscribe. It’s free — and you’ll be the first to get the next drop.

🎧 Listen to “Resonance” on Soundcloud

🖼️ Download the visuals on Google Drive

✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

🌐 Visit my website

No grand wishes.

Just this: stay in tune. See what unfolds.

Leave a comment

What is this?

The Mood Drops is a monthly creative series: one mood, explored through a song and a visual artifact. Each drop stands on its own — no genre, no storyline, no rush toward resolution. Just a feeling, examined from a few angles, and released quietly once a month.

You can read more about the experiment here.

Possibility as a mood

It feels like standing mid-step. Not arriving. Not hesitating.

It’s the quiet confidence that nothing is finished and nothing is wrong.

Less excitement, more openness. Less certainty, more permission.

It’s a soft forward pull rather than a push.

It’s a sense that action matters more than intention, and that movement itself creates meaning.

It is calm. Hopeful.

Possibility lives in the space between knowing and doing, where something could happen, simply because you moved.

Why Possibility, and why January

Possibility needs motion.

Not the dramatic kind. Not reinvention.

Just movement — enough to shift the air.

I’ve never been much for resolutions. Declaring a brand-new self on January 1st has always felt a little loud, a little performative. Yet, I understand why January carries weight. The calendar turning over feels like permission. A blank page. A moment where trying again feels slightly easier.

What interests me isn’t the date. It’s the gesture.

I keep thinking about an image I once saw. I can’t remember where or when, but it stayed with me. A small duckling walking toward a sunrise.

I love that duck. No grand leap. No finish line. Just a tiny creature moving, one step at a time, maybe toward something brighter. Not knowing what comes next, only that standing still isn’t the point.

That’s how I think about possibility … as motion that creates openings.

We don’t wait until everything is clear. We move, and clarity follows. We take a step, and something shifts. We don’t need January 1st for that. Every day holds the same potential if we’re willing to move into it.

That’s why Possibility felt like the right mood to begin with.

From mood to image

Before there was a song, there was an image.

I kept circling this idea of being on the edge of action — no longer still, not yet in motion. Of standing in that quiet in-between where something could happen, if we let it.

The visual that emerged shows a figure that isn’t fully one thing or another: part human, part bird. Upright and grounded, but with wings that suggest movement is possible, maybe even inevitable. The body leans forward slightly, as if listening for a cue only it can hear. Not flying yet. But no longer waiting.

The world around it feels unfamiliar but calm. A softened city. Open sky. Morning light. Nothing collapsing. Nothing resolved. Just space.

That’s Possibility to me.

Not certainty.

Not arrival.

Just the moment when motion becomes available.

And then came the song

The song Possibility grew directly out of that feeling.

It isn’t about arrival. It’s about choosing to move. About letting action replace intention. About trusting that something responds when we do.

Musically, I wanted the same suspension the image holds. No hard beat. No urgency. Just slowly evolving textures that feel like breath, light, and drift. A recurring melodic idea that returns like a thought you keep circling — not because it’s resolved, but because it still matters.

The vocals stay close and intimate, half-sung, half-spoken, as if the decision to move is happening in real time. Quiet, but firm.

This song isn’t a declaration.

It’s a step.

Downloads & listening

This drop comes with a few things you can take with you, shared for personal enjoyment, not for commercial use.

You’ll find three downloadable JPEGs based on the Possibility artwork:

• Wide (16:9) — for desktop backgrounds

• Vertical (9:16) — sized for phone lock screens or wallpapers

• Square (1:1) — for wherever square things live

Use them, keep them, or let them sit quietly in the background.

The listening link here (and above) is a private, lightweight MP3 stream on SoundCloud.

If you’d like a downloadable version of the song (MP3, FLAC, or WAV), just reach out. Some parts of this project are meant to be shared slowly and personally.

Why this is the first Mood Drop

Possibility felt like the right place to start.

Not because it’s grand. But because it’s honest.

Because nothing is finished. And nothing is wrong.

Because movement itself can be meaningful — even when we don’t know where it leads.

This is the spirit of The Mood Drops: one mood, explored fully, without rushing toward resolution.

A small ask

If this mood landed somewhere for you, I’d love to know.

A comment, a message, or sharing this helps more than you can think. This project grows through exchange, not amplification.

Take a step, see what responds.

🎧 Listen to “Possibility” on Soundcloud

🖼️ Download all visuals on Google Docs

✍️ Read the lyrics on Coda

Leave a comment

Share

I’m starting something new.

An experiment in public. An art piece in motion. I’m going to map the moods of my life through art, and I’m curious who might want to come along for the ride.

I call it The Mood Drops, and it’s built around a simple idea: each month, I share one song and one visual artifact, both shaped around a single mood.

Because that’s how creativity shows up for me, and maybe for you too. Some months feel hopeful. Some feel glitchy. Some feel soft, restless, melancholic, playful, heavy, or unexpectedly bright. Rather than forcing everything into a big, polished project, I wanted to honor that rhythm instead.

I love the idea of taking it slow. One drop at a time.

What are The Mood Drops?

The Mood Drops is a slow, open-ended creative experiment, shared freely.

On the 1st of every month, I release:

• one original song

• one visual artifact inspired by that month’s mood

Everything is free to access.

To make sure you don’t miss a drop, you can subscribe for free on Substack. Subscribing simply means you’ll receive each new mood drop as it is released.

Occasionally, I may offer optional physical pieces inspired by specific moods for those who want a tangible trace of the work. Supporting the project this way is entirely optional.

Each drop stands on its own. Over time, these songs and visual artifacts may form an emotional archive — a kind of personal soundtrack, released slowly. They may start to speak to each other, or they may remain exactly as they are. That openness is part of the experiment.

The Mood Drops will arrive right here, on Substack. Subscribers receive a post with the song, the lyrics, and the visual artifact. Everything works on desktop and mobile, and stays available over time.

Why I’m doing this

I’ve spent a long time working in structured systems: roadmaps, strategies, metrics, timelines. I respect them. I’m good at them. And in many parts of my life, I still love them.

But my creative work doesn’t thrive there.

Music and visuals arrive differently. They come as moods, not milestones. Sometimes all I want is to stay with a single feeling long enough to articulate it, without worrying about where it fits, or how it performs.

That doesn’t mean I want chaos. It means I need a different kind of structure.

The Mood Drops use a monthly rhythm not as a roadmap, but as a container. A gentle, recurring invitation to explore whatever wants to surface.

This project is my way of protecting that space and inviting you to it.

Adding a visual element to my music is essential because this is where it all started for me. Before the songs, before the voices, there were images.

I wrote about that early discovery, and about tools like Midjourney and Remix AI in a previous essay (Becoming an AI Pop Artist). AI is a creative partner here. It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t lead, and it doesn’t create by itself. This experiment lives in the space between intention and surprise.

Who this is for

The Mood Drops are for the curious.

For anyone who enjoys following a feeling and seeing where it leads, whether through sound, visuals, or words.

This is for those who don’t mind things that don’t quite fit in a box. Who are open to a little experimentation, a little surprise, and the occasional “well, that took an unexpected turn.”

It’s not about keeping up or optimizing your feed.

It’s about discovery, one mood at a time.

Support the experiment

The Mood Drops is free.

If this project resonates, the simplest way to support it is to stay in the conversation — subscribe for free to receive future drops, leave a comment, or share it with someone who might appreciate it.

Your attention, curiosity, and feedback matter.

From time to time, I may also offer optional physical pieces inspired by particular moods. Everything else remains an open invitation.

A note on pace

This isn’t about constant output or chasing attention.

It’s about consistency, curiosity, and letting moods unfold.

Some months will surprise me. Some might surprise you. That’s the point.

If this sounds like something you’d like to receive — quietly, regularly, without urgency — you can subscribe for free so you don’t miss the next mood.

Welcome to The Mood Drops.

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There are two kinds of people in this world:

those who love listening to Christmas songs… and those who don’t.

And both camps have their reasons.

Some people melt the moment they hear sleigh bells. It’s nostalgia, tradition, a warm and familiar signal that the season has begun. Others hear the same bells and feel pressure, exhaustion, or the emotional whiplash of being told to “be merry” on command. Or they simply don’t care and find it all a bit annoying.

I’ve always been fascinated by how the same Christmas song can feel joyful to one person and unbearable to another.

So in the spirit of inclusivity — and because December is nothing if not emotionally complicated — I wrote a holiday song for both camps. A little tender, a little gloomy, a little Irish-folk melancholy, a little sparkly at the edges. Christmas Isn’t for Everyone is for the people who feel the magic, the people who feel the heaviness, and those who feel both.

The Songs on My Holiday Playlist

My all-time favorite Christmas songs couldn’t be more different.

On one side: “Petit Papa Noël” by Tino Rossi — soft, sweet, nostalgic, the sonic equivalent of warm milk and a hug. It’s a lullaby for kids waiting for Santa to arrive while they sleep, pure innocence and soft wonder.

Rossi’s light baritone is velvet: warm, gentle, almost glowing. He sings like someone tucking a child under a thick blanket, safe from the cold.

On the other side: “Fairytale of New York” by The Pogues — messy, brilliant, crude, sharp enough to cut straight to the bone. It’s a bruised and beautiful ballad about love, regret, and the grudges we carry.

Shane MacGowan’s rasp is all gravel and heartbreak, while Kirsty MacColl’s voice is bright and defiant, cutting through his roughness like cold air through a cracked window. Together, they’re chaos and tenderness in harmony — a portrait of Christmas that feels almost too real.

That duality is exactly what I wanted to capture: the tenderness and the ache, the hope and the weight, the candlelight and the shadows it casts on the wall.

My Amis Imaginaires & the Irish-Folk Current

As usual, my Amis Imaginaires (imaginary friends) were the first ones in the room with me. (If you’re new here, I wrote about my AI creative toolkit in an earlier essay — you can read it here.)

They helped me wander through ideas, iterating endlessly, chasing down emotional threads I couldn’t quite articulate. We explored different directions, moods, textures. They helped shape the vocals, the instrumentation, and the atmosphere I was aiming for. They never complained about my (occasionally questionable) ideas. They just listened, suggested, and surprised me — the way imaginary friends always have.

Somewhere in that back-and-forth, the Irish-folk current quietly surfaced. Lilting melodies. Rough sweetness. A violin that can cry and celebrate at once. It fit the emotional landscape perfectly.

And while Fairytale of New York relies on a blistering back-and-forth duet, I didn’t want a conversation. I wanted contrast — two emotional temperatures in one song. Warmth and frost. Comfort and truth.

A track that could hold both gloom and wonder, because that’s how I think about the holidays. And I needed two voices to get there.

And Then There’s Biff T. Johnson

Biff T. Johnson (yes, my unofficial holiday-song muse) brought something irreplaceable to this track. His presence, tone, pacing — the emotional “other half” of the duet without ever turning it into an argument — gave the song another layer for AI to shape. His character added a kind of human grit, that lived-in crackle that makes the track feel both warm and weary.

The contrast between Biff T.’s voice and Lili’s was exactly what I wanted — two textures brushing against each other, soft on rough, bright on worn. Their interplay is the whole vision of the song.

Saying Biff T.’s contribution was invaluable is an understatement.

You really can’t make Biff T. up… although I did.

A Holiday Song for All of Us

So this year, instead of forcing myself into the glittery soundtrack of December — or shutting my ears every time I hear bells jingling — I made a little treat for all of us. For the people who feel joy or heaviness, nostalgia or tenderness, celebration or longing.

Christmas Isn’t for Everyone is a song for anyone who’s ever loved the season… and for anyone who’s ever felt slightly out of tune with it.

Give my song a spin, share a comment, hit subscribe, and visit my website for more music and musings.

🎧 Listen to the song here → Christmas Isn’t For Everyone

✍️ Read the lyrics here → Lyrics: Christmas Isn’t For Everyone

🌐 Check out my website → Lili & The Mood Swings

Instead of wishing you “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Holidays”, I’ll say “have a Christmas and Holidays”.

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Pop music only toys with aging—The Beatles asked playfully, “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?” while Lorde, still a teenager, sighed, “It feels so scary, getting old.”

But who’s writing about what happens when you age… wrinkles, gray hair, menopause?

There isn’t exactly a Spotify playlist called Hot Flashes & Crow’s Feet. Pop music loves youth, with the rare nods to aging, but mostly skips the messy middle. Once estrogen leaves the chat, the soundtrack cuts off.

That silence felt like an invitation.

Carl Honoré, who writes about aging, frames life like a video game—each birthday a new level, and the later ones, he insists, are the most exciting. I love that. I just unlocked level 59, and I'm curious about what adventures come with it.

So, I wrote my own songs: Silver Lining, an ode to embracing this stage, and Level Up, a cheeky anthem about menopause—the hardest level of the game.

AI gave me the soundscape: a mashup of dramatic strings and something resembling 8-bit bleeps, sonic textures I’d never have stitched together alone.

Silver Lining

“The silver lining of clouds is not always visible at first glance, but it is there, if only one looks.” — Virginia Woolf

I wanted Silver Lining to feel cinematic, moody, dramatic. Think Lana Del Rey. Inspired by women posting gray-hair selfies, celebrating wrinkles, and clapping back at trolls—it wasn’t the nastiness I remembered, it was the women refusing to shrink.

👉 Read the full lyrics here → Silver Lining Lyrics

🎧 Listen to the song here → Silver Lining

The sparks came from different places. First, my husband, who once looked in the mirror and shrugged, “I earned these”—wrinkles not as flaws, but as evidence, receipts of a life fully lived. That moment became “I earned each line, each sweet design, that marks the passage of time.” Then came Paulina Porizkova, the supermodel turned writer and truth-teller on aging, who said, “One of the incredible things about aging is that you care less and less about what other people think”—a sentiment that echoes through “I wear these years like victories won.” And finally, Jamie Lee Curtis, actress and unapologetic champion of aging naturally, who declared, “I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy. I don’t want to hide from it.” That spirit shines in the lyric: “Baby these aren’t flaws you see, it’s my soul shining free.”

That’s the heart of Silver Lining: wearing years as victories, each one adding layers of texture and meaning. Time doesn’t just take—it gives back in depth, in story, in perspective. Not denial. Not defiance. Acceptance—with style.

Level Up

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — Friedrich Nietzsche

If aging is cinema, menopause is a glitchy 8-bit video game.

Think Atari in the ’80s: all chaos, no instructions, just a joystick and blind faith. Those clunky consoles dropped you into a screen of blinking pixels and zero guidance. No map, no tutorial. Sometimes you just hammered buttons, desperate to make something happen. That’s menopause in a nutshell.

I gave mine an AI soundtrack: choppy arcade sounds colliding with orchestral swells. Quirky and grand, grueling and monumental—all in the same song.

Hot flashes mid-meeting? Like sudden lava under your feet. Mood swings that wreck a Tuesday? Pure demolition derby. Sleepless nights where you wake up drenched and defeated? Survival mode, no exit screen.

👉 Read the full lyrics here → Level Up Lyrics

🎧 Listen to the song here → Level Up

Writing about it gave me a way to turn chaos into a story. “Mood flips like the pinball lights” — that’s me, on repeat. “Energy drains in final fight”—also me, collapsing into bed by 9 p.m., game over. The lyrics weren’t abstract; they were daily life, set to a beat.

The real shock wasn’t the symptoms; it was the silence. Menopause is everywhere in real life, but nowhere in music. That gap made me want to crank the volume.

Here you go. “From princess to warrior I’ve rearranged” may be tongue-in-cheek, but it nails the shift. You laugh or you cry. Laughter always makes the story better.

Why These Songs Matter

Silver Lining reframes aging: not decline, but story.

Level Up reframes menopause: not disaster, but redesign.

Both are experiments—lyrics from my life, and beats from my AI toolkit. I built the songs in pieces, using AI tools to shape melodies, harmonies, and voices until the sound carried the right emotion. It was a strange duet: me feeding words and moods, the machine echoing back possibilities. Somewhere in that back-and-forth, the songs became playful collaborations—part exploration, part mischief, and completely addictive. Writing them wasn’t just freeing; it was fun.

Still Playing the Game

Nobody’s clamoring for aging and menopause anthems—but maybe they should. And maybe they will. These stories are everywhere, even if they don’t chart yet.

So here they are: one cinematic, one pixelated. Two songs about growing older, changing, pressing “Start” on the next level.

Until Spotify makes a Midlife Anthems playlist, start building your own—Silver Lining and Level Up make a pretty good opening tracklist.

While you age—because we do that all the time— check out my website, give my songs a listen, leave a comment, and stick around for more of my AI-fueled experiments and behind-the-scenes stories.

My childhood amis imaginaires—imaginary friends—were more than just companions. Together, we invented characters, dreamed up adventures, and spun stories where we’d explore new worlds or get into mischief. My partners used to be invisible.

Now, my amis imaginaires are AI collaborators that listen, make suggestions, and sometimes surprise me.

My creativity follows my mood. Some days, ideas arrive dressed in dreamy, cinematic sounds; other days, they burst in with the raw energy of punk rock. Each spark seems to ask for its own musical language.

This is why I wanted my imaginary band, “Lili & The Mood Swings”, to have a name that captures these unpredictable rhythms.

Creative Kernels

Ever feel your imagination sprint ahead, flinging ideas faster than you can catch them?

I like to describe my creative process as a popcorn machine. Ideas pop like kernels, sometimes slow and scattered, sometimes in a wild, chaotic flurry. At peak moments, they explode all at once, making it hard to know which one to chase first. The chaos is both exhilarating and overwhelming, and never the same twice. Even the unpopped kernels feel full of potential, waiting for the right spark next time.

This isn’t just how I make my music. It’s how I experience every creative pursuit, whether for work or for play.

AI as a Catalyst for Creative Evolution

AI is my creative partner, guided by my input and drawing on its vast storehouse of music. All artists build on what came before. Just as rock’n’roll grew from blues and country, disco emerged from soul, funk, and club culture, and hip hop fused spoken word with beats and samples, every new movement is born from remixing and reimagining the past.

With AI, I’m continuing that tradition, pushing my songwriting into unexpected territories and experimenting in ways that feel genuinely creative.

Brian Eno: Oblique Strategies and Embracing the Unexpected

In the early 1970s, Brian Eno famously described himself as a “non-musician,” a label he embraced while working with Roxy Music and through much of his career. This reflected his unconventional approach, valuing experimentation, texture, and process over traditional musical training or virtuosity.

I, too, identify as a “non-musician.”

Eno’s creative philosophy inspires me. He pioneered ambient music and generative art, building systems designed to surprise even himself. I keep a deck of his Oblique Strategies cards on my desk. Sometimes they stir my kernels in a new direction, and sometimes they send them scattering everywhere. The card “Abandon normal instruments” came at a good time for me, while “Don’t be frightened to display your talents” gave me the confidence to publish my music.

Eno is realistic about AI’s limits. He’s said that while AI can generate impressive results, the most meaningful art still comes from intentional human input and curation. He welcomes new technologies and is always curious about what creative accidents they might spark, but insists the real magic comes from how we use these tools. I can’t agree more.

Creating my Song “Trouble”

“Trouble”, from my album Come Out Swinging, is soaked in teenage nostalgia: “Midnight in my blood, sneakers on the wire”, and that electric rush of breaking rules just because. That kind of mischief isn’t just rebellion: it’s a form of risky play, a vital part of growing up, building confidence, resilience, and a sense of independence.

I steered AI through countless iterations, chasing a melody that captured the restless spirit of those nights, moments where curiosity met courage, and every act of defiance felt like discovery. The process was anything but automated. It was hands-on, shaped by memory, intuition, and emotion until the music pulsed with that raw, youthful energy I remembered so clearly.

Now, when I listen to “Trouble”, I hear it: that spark of freedom and possibility, brought to life through a rare blend of human experience and machine precision.

The Debate: AI, Artistry, and Money

Perhaps you heard the concern: “AI is stealing money from real artists.”

But what is a “real artist”? To me, it’s anyone who brings ideas to life using the tools they have—brushes, synthesizers, or algorithms. The act of creation and the tools we choose are inseparable.

Is AI really stealing money? The real challenge for music artists isn’t AI but rather the economics of streaming, with only 0.4% of streaming artists relying solely on this income. AI is just a tool for creativity, not the cause of shrinking payouts.

Art can be a passion, a profession, or both, and every artist’s path deserves respect, no matter the tools we use.

The Joy I Get from Creating with AI

Amid all the noise and debate, one truth remains for me: creating with AI brings me joy. There’s the unpredictable pop of ideas, the freedom to experiment, and the unexpected discoveries that keep pulling me back in.

AI has become an essential part of my creative toolkit, an honorary member of my imaginary band. It helps me explore sounds, stories, and styles I might never have uncovered on my own. Even if the end result was only to live in my personal playlist, the act of creating is its own reward. It’s a messy, exhilarating dance between curiosity and discovery. In that dance, AI is the partner that expands the floor, not the one that steps on my toes.

If you haven’t yet, give my album Come Out Swinging a listen and decide for yourself. And if you do, who knows? Maybe I’ll earn a fraction of a penny!

I’d love to read your comments. Drop them below, and subscribe or follow me to read more!

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These lines from "Le Blues du Businessman" capture the regret of a corporate executive who traded artistic dreams for success. Written by Luc Plamondon and Michel Berger for the 1978 French rock opera Starmania, this haunting song was originally performed by Claude Dubois. When Tim Rice translated it for the English version “Tycoon” (1992), he turned this poetic masterpiece into the generic "I Would Love To Change The World" - completely gutting its raw vulnerability and beauty.

I would have liked to be an artist.

But I didn't. Not at first.

The 10,000-Hour Detour

Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule haunted me. True expertise demanded patience and persistence I simply didn't possess. While others practiced scales or sketched portraits, I calculated the math: 20 hours per week for 10 years. The commitment felt insurmountable.

So I made a different calculation entirely.

Business school. A master's degree in marketing research and statistics for social sciences. Thirty-something years climbing corporate ladders across continents, juggling brands both small and mighty. Scott Galloway puts it bluntly: "People who tell you to follow your passion are already rich. Follow your talent." I followed the money.

But passion? Passion found me anyway.

The Algorithm Whisperer

Long before data science became cool, I was already deep in algorithmic weeds. I worked on "next product to buy" functions for major retailers when recommendation engines were still clunky experiments. I wrestled with early text analytics and sentiment scoring when natural language processing felt more like dark magic than science, repeatedly categorizing furious rants into positive reviews. Each breakthrough felt like taming a wild animal: unpredictable, exhausting, but oddly thrilling.

Each new tool gave me that familiar kick - the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of efficiency gained. I wasn't creating art, but I was creating something. Systems. Insights. Solutions that actually worked, at least a little better than the previous ones.

Then 2022 happened, and everything I thought I knew about obsession got redefined.

My Midjourney

Getting early access to Midjourney felt like winning the lottery. I was so excited I actually almost enjoyed navigating Discord's chaotic interface just to type "/imagine" and watch pixels transform into dreams.

My first creation was “Ghosts haunting a bowl of spaghetti on a sunny day”. It was crude, surreal, and absolutely magnificent. I posted it everywhere with the caption "Midjourney is trippy..." - the understatement of the decade. For the first time in years, I felt that electric buzz of pure creation.

But it was still just a fascinating side-quest.

The Remix Revolution

Everything changed when I became a beta user of Remix.AI in 2023. Suddenly, I wasn't just creating in isolation - I was part of a community. You'd scroll through your phone, discover someone's wild prompt, feel inspired, create your own variation, share it, watch others remix your creation. It was collaborative art at the speed of thought. At 3am, staring at my thousandth Remix creation, I wondered if I was just a middle-aged executive playing with shiny toys. Then someone remixed my work, adding elements I never imagined, and I realized this wasn’t about me anymore.

These early days were magical. You could pair your visual creations with music - Spotify links, YouTube tracks, MP3 files. The combination of image and sound created something greater than the sum of its parts. When compliance killed the music feature, I thought the magic was over.

I was wrong. It was just beginning.

Finding My Voice in the Algorithm

When Remix was barred from allowing Spotify and YouTube integrations, restricting music to AI-generated or user-owned tracks only, I followed the new path. Udio, Suno, and their algorithmic siblings became my new playground. Suddenly, those decades of not learning to read music became an advantage. No muscle memory to unlearn. No "proper" techniques to abandon. Just pure experimentation.

I've always been an avid music listener, someone who actually pays attention to lyrics. I believed I too had something to say. I could have used AI-generated lyrics - the tools certainly offered that option - but I wanted to tell my own stories. The melodies could be algorithmic, but the words? Those had to be mine.

These tools are beautifully crude, for now. Taming them requires luck, patience, and a willingness to embrace happy accidents over technical mastery. I’d generate the same song dozens of times, missing important meetings because I was stuck in iteration hell, desperately trying to coax version 39 into perfection until I ran out of my allotment of credits. The most maddening moment? A great groove, a great opening, and the vulnerable yet clever lyrics of my song “Level Up” (about menopause) being delivered in a booming baritone!

Fortunately, I had expert guidance. My husband Gary, who spent years as a recording engineer and producer, became my walking encyclopedia of music production. He would listen to my latest AI composition and say things like “The bridge needs to breathe”. I’d stare at him blankly until he’d walk me over what separates good music from noise, the subtle art of arrangement, the importance of dynamics, the magic that happens in the spaces between notes.

The Moments Everything Changed

My first breakthrough was when, after listening to an iteration (the 58th) of my song “Kindness Highway”, Gary said “This is a really good song, with a proper bridge”. Kindness Highway is a slow soul about how kindness can change everything. My parents used to tell me as a kid “Si tu n’as rien d’aimable à dire, ne dis rien” - it became the chorus “If you have nothing nice to say, just turn around and walk away”.

Anyway, the ultimate validation came when one of Gary’s friends, a serious composer who’s been in the music industry for decades listened to my music and said “Some of these songs are really strong.” That endorsement from someone who’d dedicated his life to traditional music composition hit differently than any algorithm-generated feedback or social media likes. It wasn’t just that some of my songs were “good for AI music”, they were simply good. Period.

The Anarchist's Confession

The curious will listen. Some might even enjoy what they hear. The traditionalists? They’ll probably hate it. And that’s okay. But deep down, they’ll know that the future is arriving.

Here’s what matters… I’m finally living those opening lines from Starmania. I am an artist now, one with an unconventional route to creation. I have deep respect for musicians who’ve spent decades perfecting their craft. My path is legitimate too. The algorithm didn’t replace human artistry but it became my instrument for accessing musical possibilities.

I’m remaking my world, one AI-generated song at a time. The 10,000-hour rule still applies - I’m just counting different hours.

Give a listen to my album, and feel free to leave a comment: https://linktr.ee/LiliAndTheMoodSwings

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