I have a confession.
I have apparently reached the age where my answer to existential dread is to write a song about skinny-dipping at midnight.
Honestly, I’ve had worse ideas.
The song is called “Get in the Water,” and it came out of a conversation about fear, friendship, creativity, and what happens when another person somehow makes you feel more like yourself.
It is a happy song.
That matters.
2/9
The seed was simple: What happens when someone becomes a spark?
Not the source of the fire. The spark.
I already have the fire. The imagination, curiosity, playfulness, poetry, music, ridiculous associations — all that was already sitting there.
But sometimes another person touches something in you and suddenly the machinery starts running again.
I have been thinking about that a lot lately.
Lab note:
Sometimes the most important creative collaborator isn’t another artist.
Sometimes it’s a person who makes you want to create.
3/9
The song began with a metaphor.
The wasp and the fly are trapped in a jar on its side.
The wasp sees the light at the bottom of the jar — and keeps flying toward it. The other end — the mouth of the jar — is wide open. Again and again. It is purposeful. Focused. Determined.
The fly is less impressive.
It bounces around randomly.
And eventually it discovers the opening.
That became a rather useful metaphor for two different ways of living.
One is disciplined, focused, productive and relentlessly aimed at the light.
The other is curious enough to wander.
And sometimes wandering is how you find the door.
4/9
Then came the midnight swimming.
“Let’s go skinny-dipping at midnight.”
That line immediately felt right.
It isn’t really about swimming.
It is about doing something completely unnecessary simply because you are alive.
No five-year plan.
No productivity metric.
No personal-development objective.
Just:
The water is there.
It’s midnight.
Get in.
Lab note:
I am increasingly convinced that AI is particularly good at helping me discover things I already know but haven’t managed to articulate.
I give it fragments.
It throws them back.
I recognize something.
Then we chase it.
5/9
The hardest part was making the song short.
I originally had enough material for a six-minute existential folk opera.
Which, to be fair, is not exactly a problem I have never encountered before.
The three-minute version needed a much cleaner emotional arc:
Walls.
Spark.
Play.
Memory.
Courage.
Water.
That became the structure.
The Kansas memory was especially important.
A yellow summer dress.
A girl who wanted to be close.
A young man who was afraid.
A moment that passed.
And the realization that fear doesn’t have to get the final vote forever.
6/9
The chorus eventually became the center of gravity:
You’re the Spark, I’m the fire
You’re the match, I’m the flame
When I’m with you I’m more myself
And I love that man again
That last line surprised me.
It isn’t “I love you.”
It’s “I love that man again.”
That’s a very different song.
The other person doesn’t complete me.
She activates something in me.
When I’m with her, I am more curious. More playful. More imaginative. More poetic. More awake.
More myself.
Lab note:
That distinction matters enormously to me.
The spark isn’t the fire.
The spark just reminds the fire what it can do.
7/9
For the video, I decided not to make a literal portrait of the relationship.
Instead, I built a little visual mythology.
A man behind walls.
A giant glass jar.
A wasp chasing the light.
A fly wandering around until it discovers the opening.
A mysterious woman who becomes less a character than a force of nature.
A Kansas summer.
A yellow dress.
A missed kiss.
A lake at midnight.
And finally, two people running toward the water.
The visual palette changes as the character changes.
Gray confinement becomes summer color.
Summer becomes blue twilight.
Blue twilight becomes moonlight.
And finally the water becomes the place where fear loses its authority.
The subconscious mind.
8/9
The AI production stack was relatively simple:
Midjourney — cinematic stills and visual development
Google Flow Music – AI music generation — composition, arrangement and performance
Grok Imagine — image-to-video conversion
Additional AI tools — experimentation, iteration and visual motion
My job was the usual one.
I was the video alchemist standing in the middle of the orchestra pit waving my little baton while several artificial musicians did things I hadn’t specifically asked them to do.
Some of those things were terrible.
Some were surprisingly beautiful.
Those are the ones you keep.
Lab note:
The happy accidents are often where the project starts telling you what it actually wants to be.
9/9
The finished song makes me feel better.
That’s probably the simplest and most important thing I can say about it.
It doesn’t promise that nothing will be lost.
It doesn’t promise that people stay forever.
It doesn’t promise that caring won’t hurt.
It says something much more useful:
Life is short.
Fear has already made enough decisions for me.
There is still water.
There is still music.
There is still curiosity.
There is still somebody beside the fire.
So maybe I don’t need to know exactly how the story ends.
Maybe I just need to get in the water.
TL;DR:
I made a song about rediscovering aliveness.
Then I made a music video about a fly escaping a jar.
Then I decided the obvious conclusion was skinny-dipping.
Honestly, I’m pretty happy with the result.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA