Optimal Me

Everybody knows what’s best for you, but you. Everybody wants to think on your behalf, but you. Everybody wants to live your life, but you. Everybody wants you to be “perfect”—but you.

This is what “Optimal Me” is about.

It's about the noise that you hear everyday, be it from people around you, or advertisements you see on TV, or subliminal or direct messages from TV shows, or billboards as you are walking down the street.

It’s about the mold that those people or advertisements or TV shows or billboards want you to fit into, regardless of what you think or feel about it.

They are right and you are wrong. It’s that simple. They are the noise in your head. They are the noose around your neck.

Everyday you encounter that noise. Everyday you try to block it. Eventually though, it will get to you. It will make you feel that you are not good enough. Sometimes, it will even make you feel worthless. It will make you doubt yourself. It will make you insecure, sad, and depressed. It will make you feel jealous of the successes of others. It will make you go insane. A plethora of voices singing dissonantly inside your head. A cacophonous, inharmonious choir always telling you that you should be better no matter what you do. This noise will eat you alive. It will suffocate every waking hour of your life.

Some of that noise is tainted with malice and jealousy. Some people feel joy in making you feel worthless. They thrive on the failures of others and they feel complete when others aren’t. 

“Optimal Me” is a big fuck you to those people.

Of course not everyone has ill will towards you. Some people really do care about you, and they genuinely want what’s best for you. However, their way of relaying that message falls short. It’s not “optimal.”

“Optimal Me” is telling them that I’m thriving for the best that I can be.

I know for a fact that it's a never-ending quest to be the best version of who I am.  Roadblocks will lay ahead. I will stumble sometimes but rest assured, I will rise and I will continue to walk MY road of success. MY path of perfectness. MY version of “Optimal Me.”

Now I’ll move away from the song’s meaning here and tell you a bit about how we wrote and constructed the song.

We used the same method that we did when we recorded the EP “Where Time Stood Still.” I didn’t have the music prepared beforehand. We came up with the music while recording the song on the spot.

I wrote the lyrics beforehand and, in my head, I was hearing robotic, monotonous voices while reading the words of the song.

Come time of recording, I told Hadi, my producer, what the song means. I told him my idea of the industrial robotic voices, and we came up with everything on the spot and hit record. I started jamming the guitar and I came up with two riffs. We put them on top of each other and the rest followed suit from there. The chorus, the effects and soundscape, the guitar solo—everything you hear was created in that zeitgeist; in that moment of time.

I love this method of recording because it makes us think on the spot and keeps us on our toes. Ideas are just flowing and, if you were with us in the room during the recording session, you would have been able to feel it too and—I’ll be a bit more dramatic here—touch the energy that day.

I enjoyed revisiting that method of recording a lot.

I don’t want to contradict myself here and give advice when it's not asked for, but I’ll say one thing here that I always say to myself (and I think that’s the sincerest form of honesty): No one knows what’s best for you, but you. No one can think for you, but you. No one will live your life, but you. No one will know what’s “perfect” for you, but you. 

For me, I’m living for “Optimal Me.”