When I wrote The Temple of You, I didn't fully understand what it was about.

I was 18, freshly out of high school, living away from my parents for the first time in Los Angeles, unknowingly on the brink of one of the defining events of our era: The 2020 Lockdown. 

I had very little technical knowledge of music production, but I did have a ten year old laptop, a $50 microphone, a trial version of protools, and suddenly, a lot of free time on my hands.

Like many of the things I create, The Temple of You came out all at once: verses, chorus, and bridge poured forth into creation in a way that felt like channeling, words from my very core, or maybe from somewhere else entirely. 

Reflecting on the song five years later, there is a haunting juxtaposition between hardened esotericism and desperation. The same speaker who asks us to “call me Ivy League” in one verse asks the listener if they could “believe if I said I was trying” in another. 

Lyrically The Temple of You is in some ways reflective of the volatility, insecurity, and grandiosity that come with adolescence, but in others feels to me transcendent of the youth and naiveté that brought about its creation. The questioning and pleading of the speaker in the verses (who, I suppose, is me) invokes the anguish brought on by societal standards, internal perfectionism, the public eye, and even narcissistic abuse.

The feeling of not being good enough, of never being good enough is familiar to many of us, but was especially fresh for me at that time. I was, after all,  a burnt out, former gifted kid, STEM school, Silicon Valley refugee just starting to navigate my way through a world that would shortly be irrevocably be altered by the COVID 19 Lockdown. 

I did not know, at the time, what the song what come to mean to me.

What I did know is how it sounded in my head.

I have been fighting with this song for five years. I have made three separate arrangements, countless recordings, spent dozens of hours mixing, mastering, and reworking, and sung through hundreds, if not thousands of attempts at the perfect vocal take. This song has survived computer mishaps, hard drive wipes, moves and years of fretting to get where it is today.

It was only with the supervision of mentor Cory Cullinan, use of the studio at CCRMA at Stanford, and the help of Riley Max, Elizabeth Anaya, and the entire 2024 Stanford Summer Recording Workshop group, (including a group of very talented music students from Pikes Peak College in Colorado) that I have been able to do The Temple of You some justice.

This new version finally sounds something like the song I heard in my head half a decade ago, and I am thrilled to have grown into it, and to finally share it with you in the way it's meant to be heard.

I am pleased to announce that Temple of You will be coming the Streaming Platforms at 1:13 PM your timezone on October 31st.