Having unique production techniques is becoming more important than original lyrics song concept in today’s pop music. Lucky for Owl City, the new song called Fireflies, has all of the above.
A lot of the vocal production effects used throughout the song involve two similar sounds (Compression and Autotune) – which we’re all used to hearing, but Owl City did it in a way that makes it different. The vocals are extremely compressed and breathy, which gives a really cool effect. The vocals are created by singing slightly off-tune and emphasizing certain melodies in order to make special effects from autotune.
Side Note: My music engineer tells me all the time that he hates when people come into the studio and tell him they want to sound like T-Pain, and then they just fart around on the mic. There’s actually some skill involved in singing the right way into an autotune plugin so that it creates the T-Pain effect (which is played out anyway).
What are the Fireflies Lyrics about anyway?
Written by Adam Young, Fireflies is “said” to be about his insomnia. Suffering from insomnia is actually quite common with songwriters and musicians (myself being one of them). Adam Young’s lyrics are usually tricky to interpret however, and some say that he intends for most songs (and this song) to be interpreted personally by the listener.
Fireflies Music Video – by Owl City
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