I wrote a song with my brother Lars. It’s a sad boi breakup banger produced by my friend Noah Berg. The entire process was a thrilling series of discoveries and I was able to (needed to) work with people I love. It’s called Strangers Again and on March 14 it went live on every streaming platform I know of. I’m going to tell you about how it all happened and what the song means to me, but as the saying correctly goes: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Here is Strangers Again by Brandon Borror-Chappell & LARSEN on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. So far our pudding has been eaten 3,150 times by 2,169 people in 82 countries, per Spotify’s data reporting. The listener I’d most like to meet is the person who streamed it twice in Nepal. I hope I get that chance.
I don’t think the song has peaked yet, but of course it is possible that it has. Regardless of what its streaming graph looks like from here on out, I’m enormously proud of it and I love it very much. This is how we made it:
The Acorn
In July 2024, Lars and I were together on Gotts Island, Maine. His debut solo album Club Americana had already been out for some time. What I love most about this album is that it shows what he is capable of. It isn’t super refined, but there are flashes of his full power as a musician that make me so excited for his future projects. To my eye, the brightest flash is the second verse of Shotgun Door. Let me know what you think. Anyway! As the waves of the Atlantic slapped against the granite shore and a pack of seagulls squawked and pecked at a pile of mackerel remnants from the morning catch, Lars and I sat at the sturdy wooden table and talked about songwriting.
Lars: “I write songs quickly. I’m not bragging, that’s just how I do it. They just come out. And I write the words down and that’s what they are. I don’t think my lyrics are that great, but once they’re out, I don’t really know how to work on them.”
Me: “I remember when I was not in a great place, I connected more with songs I heard. And I connected most strongly with songs that said something I realized I wanted to say to someone, or said something that I realized I wanted to hear from someone.”
We have both experienced prolonged periods of psychological instability and we both know how it feels to emerge from that period and come back into yourself and have to deal with the aftermath of the damage we caused when we were unwell. You can’t say it wasn’t you, because it was, but it was the worst version of you. But even though you’re better now, you can’t undo what you did. And it makes you wish you had never met the person because now you have to live with the shame of knowing this person you had a deep connection with will live out their lives with these awful memories of you.
Both of us: “Well that seems like it could be a song idea.”
The Planting of the Acorn
About a month later, I was in Massachusetts visiting family. Lars showed up to my grandparents’ house in Plymouth after dinner. “Do you wanna go record something?” “Right now?” “Yeah.” “Okay.” I borrowed my Grammy’s Hyundai Santa Fe and followed Lars to his apartment. During the ten minute drive, I was thinking of my miserable 22 year old self who was not doing well and had pushed away everyone who could see that and had tried to help. And I sang aloud to myself, “I got what I wanted. You left me alone.”
Once the equipment was set up, Lars asked, “What do you got?” And I sang those two lines. He grabbed a little synth pad and played a series of chords that began somberly and kept descending. They looped for a while as our heads bopped. Then he took the pad again and played a second chord pattern, one that I certainly wasn’t expecting, and this one was bouncy and hopeful - it had a little spring in its step. By this point it was already getting quite late. I was trying to come up with lyrics, I was a bit stuck down a cul-de-sac of self improvement and trying to make the words “I turned wine into water” work, a nod to my sober journey.
I said, “I haven’t written a song before but I know that if I’m going to, I am a lyrics first person and I need some time to cook. This is a more serious project than I initially thought and I want to figure out what I want to say.” I simmered for a week and a half and figured out roughly the message I wanted to communicate in each section of the song. Verse one: I fucked up and it sucks. Prechorus: I’m fixing myself but I know it’s too late. Chorus: I wish we didn’t have a past so that we might have a future. Verse two: Even if I could change your mind, there’s no place for me in your world anymore. Chorus Chorus End.
We returned to the studio. The track played on a loop, I tinkered with the words, and kept singing them over and over trying to get it to feel right. The verses stuck pretty early. It was interesting to try to figure out how to sing that prechorus part, which is over the bouncier chord progression. This was so exciting and fun and intense. And I felt like I was doing something that anybody can do. We all sing, all the time. Every sound you make is at some frequency, and the modulation of that frequency contributes to the meaning of what you say. So I was just…saying the words over and over at different frequencies until it felt like the right way to properly communicate what I’d written.
Lars was sitting in front of me. I was humming and riffing over and over and finally hit the “I wish I was nobody to you,” in a certain melody and it felt good coming out and Lars immediately turned around and said, “I like that.” And now that’s what it is.
The Growth of the Sapling
Noah Berg served a one year sentence as Music Director of the Hyannis Sound, a ten man a cappella group that sings around Cape Cod in the summer (more on my experience there in a future post). When I learned my parts in the songs that Noah arranged, I felt as though I were a string on an instrument being played by a player who understood how best to play me. Noah is a really wonderful guy with a beautiful musical mind and I believe he will one day win an Oscar for composing the Best Original Score. I showed him our demo and asked if he’d be interested in producing it and he said yes.
I went to Noah’s apartment in Brooklyn and he hung pillows and blankets on the walls of his office and I re-tracked my vocals over a simple, beautiful piano backing track he’d cooked up in probably twenty minutes. I asked Lars to get into a studio and record his guitar - to me, the guitar is the muffled distant voice of the jilted lover, who shares the fantasy of never having crossed paths before but no, is not coming back.
I have never felt like more of a chimpanzee than when I was attempting to communicate my musical ideas to Noah with his NASA display of digital production tools. Here are some direct quotes from one of my feedback emails:
Beautiful piano playing. What is that second chord in the intro? Some kind of inversion? It’s sick. Those little…slicey things, they sound very Linkin Park. Just curious what you stuck there.
I like the little ghosty whispering throughout
Lol at the note on “too” in “too many fences to mend” - I like it, it makes the verse kind of step hesitantly down a staircase. Just ‘lol’ing at you taking my voice and just yanking it down there haha.
And that’s from me writing my thoughts. When I was sitting in the room with him, it was grunts and hand gestures. It was so cool.
After much back and forth we reached a plateau where Noah assured me my remaining pitches would be handled not by adding, but by mixing. So we sent the track to my other Hyannis Sound Music Director, Colin Egan for mixing. Mixing is important! It’s mostly just adjusting volume knobs, I think. But Colin also did some production stuff, including that really cool chikachikachik right before verse two starts.
Noah has very heightened auditory senses, it’s like he can see the full range of color and I can only see in grayscale. So when we both listen to the pre-mix, he can hear all the parts interacting with each other, but it just sounds muddy to me. Colin knows how to clarify all the different parts so that I am able to see the thing in color. Or: it was like we’d been staging and rehearsing a play, and then Colin showed up and controlled the spotlighting so the audience knows where they should be looking throughout the performance.
I don’t know. It was all so cool, and I was so out of my depth, and the collaboration was so fun, and I got to be a part of making something that I never ever ever would have been able to make on my own. And now the song has been mastered, and my friend Ryan Gordon who is this other genius I know who works at Google and builds apps and games in his spare time helped with the album art and it was such a joy to just be in a Google Slides presentation with him while he presented different iterations based on my Simian input.
The Towering Oak
Here are some reviews I collected from people who previewed the song in different stages:
It’s a proper song. Not like a hobby song.
Who’s singing? Really? Wow! Your voice has a nice quality, and super engaging POV.
This lowkey sounds like something I would actually listen to
The gays are gonna love this
I’m tapping my feet here in Lisbon in my waffle robe
It makes me want to dance in a Berlin nightclub
The song is so sad! I’m surprised because you are so happy
I’m so relieved I don’t have to pretend to like it
Fabulous!
I reckon it’ll go viral but what do I know about music
Dude this is INCREDIBLE! My boys LOVE IT. We are shaking our asses!
If you listen - thank you! If you like it - you’re welcome!
I am excited to make more.
Thanks for taking us into the process, you and your brother Lars are monster talents!
great song, congratulations and thank you for the kind words. it was very fun to work on the album art