The Rest Between Notes
Deconstructing “Fed Up”
Cover photo credit: Reddit
Have you ever been in a treadmill relationship? One where you are walking… then running… then sprinting… but when you look up, exhausted, you realize you haven’t actually gone anywhere?
In February 2026, I ended an extremely difficult phone call with someone very close to me. After having given this person the benefit of the doubt for years, something unraveled during that phone call. I felt a tickle in my chest, the feeling I get when a song has arrived. (Does anyone else have this experience?)
I scrambled to find pen and paper. This song was incredibly painful to write, because as the lyrics emerged I couldn’t hide from the reality of the situation anymore.
So I ripped off the metaphorical Band-aid. An hour after ending the call, the lyrics of “Fed Up” were fully written.
Within a week, I sent the demo to my producer, Nico Laget at Sweet Spot Studio. The demo featured a buzzy driving bass line with emphasis on the beats 1 and 2 ½ .
I needed this song to convey the feeling of the slow realization that no matter how much you give to the relationship, the other person will always want more. This person who is supposed to love you is draining the life out of you.
This song needed to be dark and synthetic, but still beautiful.
Nico loved the bass sound in my demo, so he kept it. (This doesn’t happen often… I’m secretly super proud when he keeps elements from my demo!)
The sonic structure of the song was really important to me, because I wanted it to mirror my experience in the relationship.
I wanted a gradual increase in intensity over the first 2/3 of the song, just as tension builds gradually in a treadmill relationship. Think of the myth of the frog who stays in water as it gradually heats to a boil.
After the gradual increase, I wanted an abrupt change - a quiet moment of clarity. The first half of the final verse is stripped all the way down, followed by a sonic explosion as the song ends. The dam breaks, pain is accompanied by tremendous relief at seeing clearly for the first time in a long time.
This means that the ending of the song would be very important in terms of dynamic and instrumentation. My demo conveyed this concept for the ending in a very clunky way - not nearly dramatic enough! I had placed a filter on my voice to make it sound deeper, stronger… I’ve noticed this is something I do when I’m singing something particularly vulnerable. Thank goodness the filter didn’t survive past the demo!
(Listen for my dog walking around on the hardwood floor at the very beginning, during the quiet part.)
Nico began laying the groundwork for the ending.
More! More drama! (In the song… not in real life PLEASE!!!)
To begin to make the contrast more dynamic, he added strings.
Builds 3 and 4 introduced electric guitar and layers of vocals. The guitar worked, the vocals didn’t (I sound bored here).
We wanted to convey a painful cathartic release, not boredom! So we turned down the bored-sounding lead vocals. Still not the painful catharsis we were looking for:
I was a little stumped. I half-jokingly suggested that I go into the vocal booth and just scream the final lyrics. Nico said something along the lines of “sure, go ahead, we can try anything.”
On my way to the booth, I filled up my water bottle. As I watched the water stream into my bottle, a simple thought emerged: Go up an octave. It was so obvious that it felt ridiculous that we hadn’t thought of it earlier.
I ran into the booth, excited to share the idea. Nico had apparently had the same idea at the same time - simultaneously we said: “go up an octave!”
In the final build, you can hear my voice stretched to its upper limits, over layers and layers of dissonance and harmony.
“Fed Up” was an incredibly cathartic song to write. The truth is that there’s a large part of me that still wishes I could have the relationship I’d imagined, but I see now that it was an illusion. That relationship never existed in the first place.
I am forever grateful to these songs that emerge and help me understand the very complicated parts of myself.
And the catharsis of “Fed Up” is ongoing! I now have a sense of what that complicated emotion sounds like now, but what does it look like?
Next weekend, my team and I will be shooting the music video for “Fed Up” in an abandoned Victorian mansion. I can’t wait to share the behind-the-scenes of the music video with you!
Literally - I can’t wait! And I won’t!
Since you are now fully acquainted with the final verse of “Fed Up”, here’s the final part of the video clip I sent to my video producer and choreographer… More to follow!
P.S. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out the “I Used to Rule the World” song deconstruction!
Final portion of Proposed Layout for “Fed Up” music video.
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