Perfect Crime is, and will always be, my super special baby.
If you go up to my Spotify profile, you’ll see that, I already have a single out before Perfect Crime. That song is called “Amanecer – Chapter I”. I wrote it back in 2021, while I was planning an album called Alhambra, but the thing is, while I did the composition, I didn’t produce it, my friend Rodrigo Garcia from VamoArriba Records, did. And Lucas Bruera (also from the label but working in Estudio Maya) did the mix and master. If you visit the song, you get to see the label seal at the bottom of the song.
Perfect Crime was the first baby out of the adventure of leaving my life in Europe behind to follow my dream, so this is the first song I finish fully by myself. I wrote, composed, performed and recorded, produced mixed and master all by myself in my home studio under my own record label, ATIKO RCRDS. And, to be honest, I think I did a pretty damn good job for a first song as a fully independent artists.
I hear mistakes on the song everytime I listen to it, but that’s just me and my technical critical side being annoying and not appreciating all the effort it took to make that first song. The truth is that I like it, I enjoy listening to it and I think it is great song and an amazing start for somebody who started producing full time 4 months earlier.
Perfect Crime is a single that came out from a challenge I took when I first began producing full time. I decided I wanted to create 50 songs until the end of 2024, and this particular song was created last 31st of July. I was in a streak of making songs I liked and enjoy a lot, but with this particular one, I really thought it was cool and decided to go for it. By the way, the first name of the project was “Baby”, not “Perfect Crime”. I named it that way at the beginning because when I created the song, I already had the first lyrics of the chorus, that was “baby, I know (insert mumbling) … BABY! hahah but then I realised that for obvious JustinBieberian reasons, calling this song Baby was not going to be a good idea. So as soon as the phrase “Perfect Crime” became a thing, I named it that way.
I really learnt a lot from Perfect Crime, and soooo many things happened along the way. Actually, the first publication date was September 9 (very symbolic date for me), but I had so many roadblocks that it was moved to September 13, only to be finally released on the 1st of November 2024. I felt super frustrated and thought it as a failure first but to be honest I really learnt from it… and thank god I didn’t realise it before the 1st of November.
The release date got delayed so many times because:
- I wasn’t skilled enough to finish the song by the time I placed the distribution deadline for September 9.
I really set my expectations really high when I placed my deadlines. I set them under the delusion of “I will make it happen, it’s my first song, it doesn’t need to be perfect”… I actually think of this as a good thing because I placed pressure on myself to make me work harder, and I did, but I needed more time. I actually felt depleted when I realised I wasn’t going to be able to meet the deadlines, and felt super sad, so this made me try to look for shortcuts to meet the deadlines to which one day…
- A colleague of mine offered to mix and master it in their studio, but they never did.
Talking to this friend of mine about this, (we actually talk regularly) and they are an amazing producer and engineer, they offered themselves to mix Perfect Crime. I was like ” YES THIS IS PERFECT “. So I uploaded the stems, prepared everything on my google drive and sent the files. And a week went by… and then another one… they wouldn’t reply my messages and I started to get nervous… until I realised, this was damaging me me more than actually stopping my release calendar until I could…
- Learn how to mix and master myself.
So I picked all the pieces of my pride up from the floor and decided to sit my ass to work and start only mixing and mastering. The problem was not sitting and learning, the problem was that I was so fixated on my deadlines that I wanted to use the time I could have destined to learn how to mix and master, to produce and finish the other songs on the list. So I decided to “woman up” and stop producing and use all my available studio time to learn how to mix and master… and it took me a month to learn both arts and then to finally apply it to Perfect Crime.
When I finished it, I was so tired of it, that I wasn’t objective anymore. In theory, you shouldn’t mix and master something you produced yourself, not only because you’re not gonna be objective about the correct placement of the elements, I think about this as when you’re a filmmaker as well, if you are a director, and know how much effort a take took, you shouldn’t edit it, because if in the end that same take doesn’t do anything good for the film, you’re not gonna be willing to cut it out because YOU’RE EMOTIONALLY ATTACHED TO IT. So yes, it’s difficult, because so many elements that really sounded great when I created the beat, where in the middle of the vocals muddying everything up, and I SUFFERED… oh god I SUFFERED because I wanted EVERY SINGLE THING to be up front, but it doesn’t work like that. And another thing, is that after 2342 listens of the same song, you start having a warped perspective of it, and at that point you either rest from it during a whole week so you can reset your perspective or close the project and release that mothafakah.
And I chose to release the mothafakah.
I couldn’t take one more day listening to that song, so I just set up my distributor, and off I went. By the way, I was in middle of exams, so I was having a nervous attack, finishing that song, discovering how releases work and everything all together and…
oh no… I forgot I needed a cover… and a lot of social media content about the content to release as well.
It was a shit show of a week. I was also sleeping on a mattress in my studio because my bedroom, during that goddamn week, was getting fixed because we had a problem with the air conditioning, so they were drilling and making noise and all the circus… oh god, I was having a mental breakdown by the day of the release.
And during the day of the release, after sitting for the last exam, I was already too tired and was also helping home for my sister’s farewell party because she was leaving the next day (she visited us for 3 weeks, she lives in Barcelona). I know I could’ve done a lot more for the release, but I was done. I was done, but happy, because a couple of months ago, and for all my life until that point, I didn’t believe I was capable of making a song, start to finish, all by myself, in a home studio.
And that day, I realised I could. And I did.
So I had no option but to repeat it again, and again, and again for the rest of my life, because I love it.
This is a summary of why perfect crime is so important to me.
Now talking about the song itself, it is not a deep song. But a song does not have to be deep to be a great song. It’s a song about a girl who escapes with her crush, but what’s so cool about it is that it takes you into a story of how he invites her to escape with him, under her point of view. It builds the tension until he’s like “are you ready to escape with me?” aaaaaaaah I love it.
I will talk about how I create topics for songs in another post, but summarizing, I take the freedom to talk about anything on singles, not necessarily things that happened to me in real life. I do this because I leave real stories of my own experiences for EP’s and albums. This way I can get to create stories and use my imagination and have fun while I keep learning and growing as an artist and producer.
When I created the base for the song I thought “wow this is really cool for a romantic escape” and every single thing in my surrounding fed into that narrative. I looked outside the car window and saw a phrase that would fill certain space of the song perfectly, and even though I was having a hard time completing my first song during production, it felt like everything helped me finish it. The sound of the microwave, the beep of the elevator, even some phrase in the local news. It was magical.
When I finally said “okey, it’s time to mix it and master” the new challenge was deciding when to leave it, when to stop, when to “abandon it”. They say “a song is never finished, it’s abandoned in an interesting point”. And now I had to decide what was that “interesting point”. I don’t know if it was the perfect interesting point or not, as I said before, I was EXHAUSTED hahah so I said “okey, fuck it”. And began the distribution.
Now I had to come up with a cover, and that was another challenge. Since during the pandemic I used to take a lot of self portraits (I’m a photographer and filmmaker as well), I had plenty of pictures to chose from, but I was in the fight between taking a new picture and use my current style, or finding something that worked. And so before making the photoshoot I remembered I made a photoshoot in my studio during the pandemic in 2020, and I thought it was PERFECT for the cover. So I decided to go for it, because 1) I had not time for a photoshoot, literally I had to upload that night and 2) I didn’t remember exactly how I did the effect, so I would have to sit and try setups until I found how I did it. So yeah, fuck it x2 and that’s how my little demon version of myself was turned into my first single cover.
About the lyrics, there’s not that much story behind it. I think I wrote them and corrected some things while I was recording because after taking distance from the song I realised that some things didn’t fit the narrative quite well. I let myself change things now because I am producing and singing them myself, if I was producing for another artist, that would be a disaster, so I give myself this freedom now because I can. Besides, even though English feels like a first language to me, it is not. I still make mistakes, all the time, and I am conscious about it, so I try to not be that hard on myself about it.
I wanted to transmit the excitement of escaping with your crush, so calling it a perfect crime was a good idea, and I think I did a good job. As well, I’m aware that my home studio has limitations when it comes to acoustics and I knew it was not going to sound as good as in the studio where I studied in Malaga, mixed by someone who works for Warner Chappel. So I was a little bit afraid of what people was going to say when they listened to my first song… I was afraid they were going to judge the quality or questioned why I didn’t pay a professional for mixing and mastering it… Well, I don’t have the budget for it yet, and to be honest… I am SO proud of what I achieved on my own, and I am so happy I decided to do it myself. Sometimes I wished I had more people in my town who are in my same position so I can make new friends here and grow together, but I am conscious I am “new in town” and this is what I have right now. By the way, Salta, the town where I grew up, is a small town and there’s no industry here for my music, but I have to start from somewhere.
Still, I am beyond pleased about my baby.
So yeah, that’s the story behind Perfect Crime, my first single.
[VERSE]
My friends are asking what happened last night
But the only thing that I can do is deny
Any crimes we committed last night
Any kind of thought of you invading my mind
[PRE CHORUS]
I remember what you said about the things that we could do
Let’s disappear together, we won’t leave a single clue
I can’t stop thinking about last night
When you came to me and said
[CHORUS]
Baby, I know my plan’s a little crazy
But I know you and I could make it work
‘Cause you’re the one that I’ve been looking for, baby
To commit this perfect crime
To commit this perfect crime
[VERSE 2]
My phone is ringing, you are waiting outside
Your lips are sealed but I know that it’s time
To execute, step by step, I remember all the lines
My heart is beating faster now
[ PRE CHORUS 2]
My imagination flies over the things that we could do
Let’s disappear together, we won’t leave a single clue
I am dying to hear you say it again.
[CHORUS]
Baby, I know my plan’s a little crazy
But I know you and I could make it work
‘cause you’re the one that I’ve been looking for, baby
To commit this perfect crime
To commit this perfect crime
[BRIDGE]
Baby, I know my plan’s a little crazy
but my car is ready to go
Are you ready?
Are you ready?
[CHORUS]
Baby, I know my plan’s a little crazy
But I know you and I could make it work
‘cause you’re the one that I’ve been looking for, baby
To commit this perfect crime
To commit this perfect crime
Baby, I know my plan’s a little crazy
But I know you and I could make it work
‘cause you’re the one that I’ve been looking for, baby
To commit this perfect crime
To commit this perfect crime