going waaayy back.
aurora, at least officially, was released in 2003 on the Bipolar Me album. the funny thing about Bipolar Me was that much of it was actually a coming together for a handful of older songs that were homeless and otherwise unknown. for one, bipolar me served as my first album as zyko and, for all intents and purposes, can be considered to be my first full release. i had been recording my own music since middle school but, as you could imagine, it was quite unlistenable... heck, a lot of my new stuff is... the old stuff DEFINITELY was. there were 2 distinct musical phases leading up to the zyko phenomenon.
the first was the casio keyboard era... throughout middle school and high school i recorded about half a dozen "albums" for which i did all the artwork and recorded to cassette. as my recording abilities were limited to a pedestrian boom box, i could only mess around on the keyboard, save as much of it to the keyboard as i can, then while replaying it back, mess around with the guitar and/or the keyboard and sing. it was terribly ghetto but it worked at least to nurture what would eventually become the era in which aurora was written. for a litle while, i also had cakewalk (the first few versions!!) and managed only a couple of terrible videogame tracks that really just consisted of a midi and me wailing on the guitar (Birdo Five O... maybe i'll share it later... or you can find it somewhere at olremix.org)
the second phase was the college phase. by the time i had gotten to college, i had been playing music for years but i was pretty rough around in the edges in just about every aspect of my work. now, however, i was around thousands of young people just like myself who also were experimenting with music and from whom i could learn a myriad of new skills and talents. i recorded another handful of albums at ucdavis, most notably The Revolving and Songs While Dreaming Outdoors... under a haze of names.
however, aurora was most definetly pre-zyko. in fact, i was in a band at the time named Element Unknown that was something of a System of a Down/Tool sounding rock group that i sang for. they rocked pretty hard and i was pretty excited at the time to be a part of it so i wrote a ton of songs during that phase that never really saw the light of day. it eventually didn't work out with the band. then i wrote this song. it was at the very end of the pre-zyko haze. since high school i had gone through everything from DJ Weedo to Reaper to just Waleed Hawatky as artist names go... but i never settled on anything... mostly because i hadn't even figured out what the hell was going on, to begin with. it all came together, i suppose, at the right time and in the right way when i trampled upon vgmix.com in 2002. i was forced to come up with a user/artist name... i looked at my age old AIM screename, zyko monkey, and the rest is history.
there were at least 3 or 4 years between my last non-zyko album, Songs While Dreaming Outdoors, and my eventual first zyko original release, Bipolar Me. i remember talking with one of my best friends, jake, about wanting to use the album as a demo for trying to get a contract somewhere. he tried to be supportive but his point was pretty clear: you're not nearly where you need to be but it was still good to finally put something out that had at least a little bit of structure and significance to it. finally. a name. zyko.
aurora, along with two other tracks on the album, were the remnants of another age. old musik from 2000, 2001 that rotted away on my hardrive after it didn't work out with Element Unknown. the song itself is just about the willow tree that was in my front yard at the time. i had my own house while in davis when i was in school... and a large, old willow tree drooped in my front yard... my house looked like something out of the lord of the rings. i named the tree aurora and one night, as i often wandered about inebriated and aimless, i sat down on the curb across the street from my house and wrote this song about my tree. the song was originally going to be for my mother but it ended up being about the tree. or maybe about both.
aurora is one of my personal favorite songs only because it carried so much mystique at the time i wrote it. on the other hand, i find it fascinating how much my own voice has changed and i don't just mean the timbre and the quality of my voice. my VOICE. the things i thought and chose to express and how. that was a very young waleed that you hear there and i don't mean just in age.
enjoy