thank you so much for the kind words 
I’m actually very proud of this but I feel like I’ve gotten kind of an ambivalent response from a lot of people that I’ve showed it to so it feels good to get a little validation.
re: the vocal effects, I didn’t realize this but reaper just comes with a stock vocoder plugin and it’s super easy to use. I shouldn’t have waited this long to use one especially with how frustrating it is for me to ever get a half-decent vocal take. ironically I’m very happy with the un-processed vocal takes I got here, I feel like it’s the best I’ve ever done, but boy it was so much less work to only have to nail a third of the vocals and let the vocoder carry the rest. I’m gonna try to do a whole album like this.
it’s funny bc when I wrote this on piano it had this kind of old-timey american songbook vibe to it that I was ambivalent about but taking it into the DAW it really transformed into something different and I love it now. I feel like getting here has taught me a lot about what’s been holding me back, like you can’t ignore your inner critic but you can’t let it stop you either. in the past I would have given up on this song because it felt bland or unsatisfying or I didn’t like some of the lyrics but instead I just gave it a chance and worked with it. I wasn’t even planning to use a vocoder, I just threw it on the scratch vocal when I started composing the instrumental parts because I was tired of listening to my own voice but still needed the melody there for reference, and suddenly it sounded like ELO instead of “a little touch of schmilsson in the night except by someone who can’t sing” and everything else built from there. it really does pay to just be open to trying new things and not take every decision super seriously. just having a sense of curiosity about “what if I tried doing this thing” made the process so much less painful than it usually is.
of course some of what has held me back has been chronic health issues and long covid and life generally being terrible and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some of those problems improve significantly since like september. hopefully that keeps up.