This whole project started out just for us. Most of the tracks you hear were Andrea sitting down and just messing around. We would be in the living room late at night, her in her chair with either the iPad or the MacBook depending on how she felt, just tinkering with sounds. Sometimes I would grab my phone and film little clips for YouTube while she built a beat or played with a melody. There was never a plan to turn it into anything bigger, it was just us making music because it felt good.
I have been making music since high school back in 2009 and over the years I have built a huge library of presets, drum kits, and synth patches in Logic Pro. I would pull those up, add in parts on the Akai MPK Mini MKIII and just see where the night took us. We tracked Andrea’s vocals with the RØDE NT1 for that warm, intimate sound, and layered in trip hop beats, upright bass, flutes, and quirky synth textures. Andrea would throw in whispers and ad libs, sometimes get feedback from her music friends, and we would polish each track until it just felt alive.
At first this was just something for us, a way to capture those nights and have a little soundtrack to our life. But as we kept going it grew into more. Each song started to feel like its own world, and before we knew it we had a whole collection that felt too good to keep to ourselves.
Andrea Mathews was a complex woman. Once she got comfortable enough with her production, she started doing it on her own. What started off as a woman not understanding grew into a fierce lion dominating a feeble prey. During the course of Hurricane Helene recovery, I spent many hours away from Andrea, leaving her with the dogs at home and her creative liberties. When Andrea passed, I was expecting to see the songs we had worked on or talked about before. I was not expecting her whole heart to be transferred into our Apple MacBook, forever ensuring her legacy in music. Andrea always said she wanted her name on a building, and one day that will happen.
This is the start of that journey.
- William J Barthel