Graeme Zinck, former Computer Science student at Mount Allison University, graduated this May and will be pursuing a Masters Degree at Waterloo University in the Fall. After graduating against the backdrop of a global pandemic, Graeme reflects on songwriting in quarantine:
“A lot of my music comes to me just sort of spur the moment. So with the first song [in the new album], Story, I was just feeling pretty upset about how everything had turned out with COVID and being unmotivated during this time is a very real problem. And part of that made me realize just how important people are to me and how challenging it is to move on with so few people to connect with at the moment. So, in that situation where I was like, oh this is weird, I suddenly had this idea of, oh, I should write something! And then suddenly, I just teleported into an alternate universe, and started jotting ideas down. And then a few hours later it’s like, oh bam, I guess I have a song. Of course, that’s only the first step because writing the the basic idea of a song is one thing and then turning that into recording takes a lot of time and a lot of work. . . I started fiddling around with piano thinking, okay, this is generally what I’m going to do, it’s pretty basic and simple. And that’s when I realized that there’s so much more you can do with simple things. My past music has always been about playing a standard musical theatre piano part [as a backing track], whereas now, I have a whole bunch of different instruments, a whole bunch of different pianos, in this case, with different sounds. And they all are extremely simple for the most part. It’s just that because they’re all layered on top of each other, you can get some incredible effects. . . And then I spent the next couple of days just like bingeing on working in Logic Pro to get some of these things together. So working on music during a pandemic was a realization of, oh, wow, things are weird. And then writing how I felt down; writing how this situation is weird. And then realizing [that] there’s so much cool stuff that can happen.”
Aside from his personal music making, Graeme was involved with Conduct Becoming and the Acapella club at Mount Allison, but he views music making as personal rather than career focused:
“I find because I don’t do [music making] as my day job, it’s my way to escape and my way to sort of reflect on my life. . . I don’t keep a diary, but in some ways my music is my diary. For instance, I’ll look back at my old album [from 2018] every now and then, and I’ll realize, wow I remember how I felt then. Oh, goodness, that’s a lot of angst! Oh my goodness, I didn’t want to feel that again! It’s like, going through your life all over again through your music.”
And Graeme has found many avenues of inspiration for his songs:
“In my first album, a lot of it was about a person who I had really liked, but then in this [new album] it’s actually quite different. The first song story isn’t about me at all. It’s a bit more about how I’ve been around a lot of people who have had a lot of challenges, and how it’s really hard to get through those. I work with a lot of people who have been diagnosed with juvenile arthritis like myself, and the struggles that that brings both in terms of diagnosis, in terms of how you feel day to day with joint pain, and in terms of the side effects that accompany any medication you take. I see how challenging that is for a lot of people. And sure, it’s challenging for me too, but it’s insane when you see how these people struggle through the things they make it through. And there’s nothing you can really do about it except say I’m there for you. And so that’s that’s what Only [the second song] is about. It’s not about my experience so much as it’s about the people around me who have who have experienced these things which are really sad; but also, they’re just snippets of their life, snippets of challenges that are accompanied by a lot of positive ends, which segues into what Story [the first song] is all about. Story is about how that connection with other people can make anything seem really powerful and exciting and happy and make life so much more meaningful beyond what those limitations of a disease are, beyond how your mental health is, beyond a pandemic. It’s those people.”
You can listen to CHMA’s full interview with Graeme Zinck here:
You can also find Graeme Zinck’s music on Spofity, Bandcamp, Apple Music, or shared on his facebook page https://www.facebook.com/graemezinckmusic/
