Porter Robinson
Years Of War - Commentary
""Years Of War" was the hardest song, I think, for me to write - I probably totalled three-hundred hours working on that one alone. Ah, yeah, this was another song where the first thing I did was write the first part of the song which is that hook, the lead melody, which is that 'Dan-dun-duh-duhduh'. And, uh, I wanted a cute vocal for this song, as weird as that sounds. I wanted someone who had, uh, a very sweet kind of timbre. And Breanne Düren made absolute sense for that. And, um, I mean to me the whole motif behind Worlds, the whole idea behind the album is this idea of fiction and fictional worlds, um, and for some people that's literature, and for other people that's movies, and for me it's video games. And, I don't know, I like this imaginary conflict. And both Sean and Breanne, y'know Sean has this like, kind of rebellious, boyish quality, and Breanne sounds really cute, and of course, she's an incredible singer - I don't say that to knock her at all. But she just had the perfect, perfect quality for the song. And, yeah, I mean - the image that we had in mind when we were writing this song was like kids with, ah, like trashcan shields, and like, y'know, baseball bat swords, y'know, going to go beat them up. So to me, "Years Of War" is a cute song. But it was not cute to write. It was really hard. Y'know, besides like five days of recording vocals, I think the project file reports 300 hours being spent on that song. It was just a real effort. Um... yeah."