Track By Tracks: Gaia Guarda - Anatomy Of Fear (2020)

1. Anatomy Of Fear:

It starts with a heavy strings section that was supposed to be an organ, I decided at the last minutes to add the strings instead because I felt like the slow introduction made it easier for people to enter the dark universe that is this album. The song ends with a big instrumental part that is one of my favorite from this album, it makes me want to do more instrumental music in the future. 

2. Cravings:

This is my challenge song, I wanted to do a song with only vocals and drums, nothing else. I love the way it turned out but I know that it might sound strange to a lot of people. It was a lot of fun to make and I feel like it has its own personality. I feel like this song shows a lot of Björk influences, and I am not mad about it. 

3. Carefully Haunted:

I wrote this song back in 2008 when I was doing my classical music studies. I am extremely happy that I was able to include it on the album. I kept the original piano, lyrics and vocal line for the first part of the song. It’s a song that I wrote about how I felt like I was haunted by my past and that I couldn’t escape it as much as I tried. It was originally named ‘’Silently Haunted’’, when I was choosing which songs would be on the album, I decided to renamed it Carefully Haunted because I felt like with time, I am not haunted by my past as much as I was before. 

4. Heartbeat:

This is definitely one of my favorite, it is one of the last song I wrote for that record. I tried to give it a 80s vie with the synths I used at the beginning and the end of the song. It’s about how hard it is to try to save someone that doesn’t want to be saved. How I felt like I didn’t know if I had anything left to give after that relationship, I felt like I had given everything, and I was terrified that I had no more love to give anyone. Turns out, love doesn’t have a limit amount you get per life and it can grow from nothing. 

5. Answer Me:

This is my slowest song, I had a lot of fun with the synth. I feel like they make that song really special. The last vocal line was the hardest part to sing in the entire album for me, it required a lot of control not to push it too hard but still sustain it enough to not drop it too fast. 

6. Who We Are:

I wrote the glockenspiel intro for a metal song a while back that never ended up being finished and released. It is my most aggressive song, I wrote the song about how I felt like nostalgia made me go back to unhealthy behaviors. There’s a part in the middle of the song with multiple voices, it represents how I felt while I was rationalizing my actions but kept doing things that were destructive behaviors. 

7. At The Bottom:

This is the darkest and more emotional song I have ever written. I went through an abusive relationship a while back and this song is about how I felt during and after I left. I wrote that song to help me heal, there’s a lot of pain in it but also hope. We are strong and resilient creatures. Nothing can fully destroy us, I believe that hope can be born in destruction.

 

8. Nothing's Hiding In The Lake:

I wrote this song about someone that were close to me that started spreading lies about me. I did have a lot of fun writing it and letting my anger out instead of letting my anger towards them show. I also wrote it around the time Prince died and I consider this song as my homage to Nothing Compares 2 U.

9. Drowning In Fear:

This is my favorite song of the album. It starts with a low note on the cello and is joined by a wave of electronic sounds. It is inspired by Greek mythology where Orfeo has to go through hell to find his dead spouse and bring her back to the living world. When he finds her, he cannot look at her until they are out of hell, the end of the song is when they are traveling back, and she is begging him to look at her.