"i don't care", an open letter by Yoyo Nagase
People always tell me I overthink everything. In fact, I have re-typed the first sentence of this open letter at least four or five times now. The sentence still isn’t perfect, but much of my life has been learning to live with imperfection.
Unfortunately these days, everything feels so high-stakes that imperfection is becoming increasingly hard to live with. If people don’t laugh at my joke, is it because it wasn’t funny? Or maybe because they think I’m an awkward person? Or maybe they hate me. Yes, that must be it. I think I need to apologize to them.
Sometimes it's not even just in the moment. I will be laying down at a beach surrounded by my best friends, and I will still be replaying that time from months ago when no one laughed at my joke.
For me, my new song “i don’t care.” is about learning to overthink a little less and to deal with my stress better. However, it didn’t particularly start that way. In fact, throughout the song creation process, I had many moments of indecision.
For instance, the intro went through nearly a dozen different versions. At first, I wanted to use a whistle sound, but after working with three or four different whistlers I couldn’t get the intonation I wanted. The whistle just felt a little bit too thin. I then thought maybe a saxophone would be better; however, that sounded a little bit too unnatural in the intro of a beach-y song. At least that process inspired us to add a saxophone layer to the final hook. In the end, we used the same sound that we had started with in the original demo: my own imitation of a trumpet noise. This process spanned nearly two months, and it was frustrating during that time not knowing how the song would start.
At some point though, I had to call the song finished. And I think that’s how I learned better to handle my own overthinking. Sooner or later the thinking has to end – it’s just a matter of when. Now that I have put in so much work and thought into the song, I can only be proud of what I produced.
I can’t wait to share the song with everyone!