House Renovated

Take her down to the studs, now I'm covered in dust.

Aug 10, 2025

If you haven’t heard, I released a new song! You can listen here! House Renovated

There’s a lot of personal changes that happened over the last three years as this song was created. Some of them are talked about in the song, some of them are entwined in the lyrics of future songs.

I wanted to share a little glimpse of what it looked like getting to create this song.

The idea

The idea for house renovated began while walking through a family member’s home while it was under renovation. A huge rain storm had seeped through the basement and caused damage at the lower level. I walked through the empty rooms upstairs. There was a plastic drop cloth covering the floors from the dust. I started to think about how experiencing unwanted change feels very similar to a house under renovation.

The wheels started turning. I felt a glimmer in my eye and searched for a piece of paper to jot down the idea. In one of the drawers there was an untouched yellow piece of card stock paper

. I quickly wrote down everything that came to my mind. It looked like this:

Which quickly turned into this voice memo when I got home. (I’m not sure how many days later, but it was roaming around in my brain). *Fun fact House renovated and Bankrupt were born in the same voice memo.

First Voice Memo

0.31 is where the chorus starts.

Most of the ideas of the lyrics stayed the same. It took about a year to fully craft the story. I had a completely different second verse (that might turn into a song itself one day).

It’s always interesting when writing a song, some lyrics I feel ready to write about, others give me a clue that I need to change something in my life before I can finish the story. The second verse that you hear now is a result of deconstructing my belief framework. This is still a process that is occurring, but enough progress was made that I felt ready to dive back into the second verse.

As the song evolved so did my genre. I’d already started to diving into the Americana genre but this song allowed that leap to happen.

Some of the instruments that you’ll hear are the mandolin, violin, and electric guitar.

Mandolin

I don’t play the mandolin, but I do play the violin and guitar. So I called up one of my friends to see if I could try using their mandolin. Here’s what that process looked like:

Violin

I grew up playing the violin, but kept getting stuck on the violin line. So I called up my friend Ellie (who is an amazing violinist and photographer). I sent her a voice memo of a violin part and she made it 10 TIMES BETTER. *Side note, as I worked on the violin part apparently I was hyper focused because our neighbors moved and I didn’t even realize it.

Here’s the screenshot of the notes that I sent her:

This was recording in the studio:

We also had live drums, bass, and electric guitar. I haven’t found any videos of the drums or electric guitar, but here is recording the bass!

Next with releasing was world building… (one of my favorite parts).

We had the opportunity to film a lot of promo videos and photos at the Benson Farm in Whitney Idaho. (It’s currently undergoing renovations and will be beautiful when it is complete). The renovations were PERFECT for what I was looking for.

Here are a couple of photos from the photo shoot: