Experiment 17: Hard to Remember

www.mikegarrigan.com 

In this episode, I take on a prompt that felt personal from the start: create a song featuring your grandfather’s handmade folk harp.

That harp has been sitting quietly in the corner of my garage studio—Two Egrets—for years. It’s not just another instrument. My grandfather, James John Garrigan Jr., built it by hand while my grandmother Nell was nearing the end of her life. Because of that, it carries something deeper than sound—it feels like an artifact of love, grief, and endurance.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

• The story behind the harp and why it feels almost sacramental
• How I transformed a single harp note into a playable synth using iZotope Iris 2
• Building a track from scratch with:
  • Harp-based sampling
  • Native Instruments Drum Lab rhythms
  • Layered acoustic and electronic textures
• Why the entire song sits slightly out of tune (on purpose)
• The unexpected lyrical hook: “It’s hard to remember”

The Creative Turning Point

The song’s meaning came into focus through Bright Lights, Big City—a story about grief, escape, and rediscovery. That influence shaped the emotional core:

Sometimes life makes us forget something essential—that we are, at our core, good.

This song lives in that tension:

• Forgetting vs. remembering
• Escaping vs. facing reality
• Distortion vs. clarity

Production Highlights

• Built from a single sampled harp note, stretched across a keyboard
• Choruses lifted with live drums + pulsing synth bass
• Subtle microtonal tuning shift (~38 cents sharp) for an off-center feel
• Late-stage decision to embrace distortion—pushing vocals and instruments to the edge

Lyrical Themes

• The slow erosion of identity through grief and distraction
• The pull toward numbing out vs. waking up
• A return to something steady and true

Key line:

“The truth don’t change, however strange.”