New Song: "MELTDOWN" (KP1-9.4), composed and arranged by Kevan Paul

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This song had a lot of different stages in development. The exciting part for me was getting the electric-violin sounds to blend with sounds that are orchestral and neo-classical. The synthesizer parts are created directly from other violin parts that were extracted out later, leaving a unique style of creating synthesizer parts. Another thing that I learned was how to adjust the software-instrument tracks to align with the tempo. This has made a big difference in my confidence in mixing the real instruments with the software-instruments. The drums were created via the Digitech GNX4. I like having the drums throughout even though the style is neo-classical. The violin parts were mixed from multi-take sections over a two-week period.

The theme of the music came from several ideas. The "MELTDOWN" that came to mind, was the recent financial meltdown with the banking industry and the global economic reprecussions that have been set in motion. The global economy is now one form of a "meltdown" that will affect everyone in a negative way, but the MELTDOWN in my original thoughts goes back to the theme of the album, which is about HEALING. There are many times that we feel emotionally drained, and this affects our health in a negative way --- just like the global economic meltdown. When we are emotionally "hi-jacked" by other people's anger and unkindness, we can often feel like we are experiencing an emotional meltdown. Nothing good seems to come from this burst of mental and physical stress, and sometimes we carry our resentment and anger with us until we have a moment of complete emotional meltdown that causes us to feel defeated, alone, and sometimes hopeless. Keeping the peptides in the brain going at a high rate to bring back the emotional state that we are addicted to, can be draining. Everyone has their own set of peptide addictions with their brain -- we are all addicted to our own set of emotions. When we can no longer keep up with ourselves and our "self-fullfilling-prophecies", we can enter a mental state of suspended reality - an emotional MELTDOWN.

Sometimes we cannot change our emotional state to the better state, and our ability to cope with the world, and the demands of living seem to over-power our better selves. Sometimes we refuse to change the course of our thoughts and actions until there is a complete "emotional collapse" or "nervous breakdown". People will sometimes fight themselves over and over again, rather than make the necessary mental or physical adjustments to establish their well-being. And sometimes, our brains cannot heal themselves without chemical intervention -- but so little is known about the brain that we struggle to find a solution from pharmaceutical science. There is never a easy solution to recover from our emotional "meltdowns", but we have to keep trying to find a solution for ourselves -- we all want to be happy and live comfortably with our thoughts.