For most of the roughly three quarters of a year I’d been actively working on my latest (September 2025) album, Chasing Rainbows, I’d had a working album title of Who I Am. So, when I set out to write a final song expressly for the album, my initial thought was to see if I could write something with that title. It wasn’t mandatory, because the title actually came from a line in the chorus of “Brand New Mirror”. However, I did have a starter concept for that title. It would relate to the notion that who we are changes over time.
When I got down to trying to write the song, I did a fair bit of research on the topic over the course of a couple of days, but I never ended up getting past blank syndrome on the actual songwriting front. Just after that, a whole bunch of things hit at once that got me going down rabbit holes of total distraction, starting up some new musical efforts based on timely opportunities, and/or spending a bunch of time trying to troubleshoot technical problems. The net is I really didn’t even think about writing the new song for a few days short of a week.
The Muse Intervenes
One morning, though, after a vivid dream, I woke up with a partial melody in my head. I’m not sure if I also had a couple phrases in my mind to go along with it, but I do know that, when I sent myself a voice note of the idea, I started out with, “that feel of addiction, it’s never too late,” proceeding to scat out the rest of what would eventually approximate the verse melody of “Chasing Rainbows”. I was still in the midst of the ongoing distractions, which included trying to remix an older recording for a specific opportunity but running into technical issues with one of the virtual instruments I needed to use for it.
When I eventually got back to the writing project, I still wasn’t getting any ideas on where to go with a lyric. I eventually decided, since I had a general idea of a verse melody, I’d try to build a rough recording around that to see if it might help get some ideas flowing. That also led to my coming up with a bridge melody, possibly before I had any further ideas on the lyrical front. At some point, though, I started brainstorming with myself a bit on the “never too late” phrase from that original voice note. I wrote down the following thoughts:
Do something before it’s too late. Could be following a dream, reaching out to someone, making a difference, learning something new, etc.
As long as you’re breathing, it’s still not too late.
If there’s a dream that’s worth chasing, it’s never too late to start.
At this point, I was thinking the song title might end up being “Never Too Late” or “Before It’s Too Late”.
Left Turn
As I was doing some further brainstorming based on these conceptual thoughts, and doing some research, I started coming across the phrase “chasing rainbows”. I became curious where that might lead. I still wasn’t thinking of it as a potential song title at that point, but I started researching different meanings of the phrase, and whether there were already songs with that title (there were, but none I found went in directions that seemed to relate to the concept that was starting to develop in my mind).
One particularly inspiring piece came in the form of a Medium post by Noor Ashikin Aziz, called “Chasing Rainbows. When effort means more than outcome”, that read:
As with every one of our endeavours, we don’t become good at something by starting it, we become good by repeating it over and over again. Training. Sometimes the outcome may be different than what we expect. With each try however, we learn something new. We build upon that experience. We chase rainbows not because we get to reach it, we chase them because we know we’re going to grow in the meantime. Even though we know that there is no rainbow. Chasing rainbows should not be a definition of a futile attempt. It’s the effort that bears the result, not the rainbow itself.
That got me thinking about the term “chasing rainbows” in the context of making art. We may or may not have a shot at earning a living through our art. We may or may not have a shot at making any widespread impact. Yet I know many people, and I’m one of them, who just keep at it in the face of all sorts of setbacks. What keeps us going? Maybe it’s who we are, or maybe it helps us become who we will someday be? Or maybe … well, who knows, but we keep putting ourselves out there.
I’d like to say the song just flowed out from that realization, but that would be a lie. However, having this somewhat more developed concept in mind did at least provide something like a framework. I wrote the first and last verses (or at least something close to what they eventually became) in a day or so, then the rest followed within another day or so, finishing the songwriting side of things at the end of June.
While I started working on the recording on the first day of July, I had a couple of major diversions for two recording projects that took up a fair bit of time in July, and I didn’t finish the “Chasing Rainbows” recording until about a week into August.
When a Song Changes Album Plans
Since I’d started planning the album back in October 2024, I’d been using the working title of Who Am I. That seemed to fit whatever loose thematic concept I had to tie the songs on the album together and give me a direction for writing a final song. “Chasing Rainbows” (i.e. the song) would have fit within that. However, now I was starting to think the new song’s title might also be interesting as the title for the album. Somewhere between mid-July and early August, I decided to make the change.
I doubt I could rationalize the new title as providing any sort of thematic binding for the lyrics of the other songs on the album. However, if I look at the collection of songs on the album, the majority are ones I wrote or cowrote in the 2020s, but one goes back to the first half of the 2000s, another goes back to the late 1990s, and one goes back at least as far as 1976. That represents an almost fifty-year span of my personal rainbow chasing on the songwriting front. I also really liked “Chasing Rainbows” as a “closer” for the main, twelve-song core of the album. (I think of “Just Another Song”, that almost fifty-year-old song, as a bonus track or encore.) Thus, the unexpected new song direction became an unexpected new album direction.