"Sugar High" was the first tune I made for the weekly Song Writing and Recording Challenge I've been part of for the past several months. I did this one in August of 2023. 

It's a fun, sparkly, kinda retro instrumental rock song where I was mainly experimenting with how to build up layers upon layers of synths.

This one started with the bass intro, where I had the idea that I wanted the bass to kind of count off the song by playing one note, then two, then three, then four (did you hear it?), and the rest of the song builds from there. 

Once I got the song to the point where it is now, I couldn't think what else I wanted to do with it, so I decided it was done.

The main challenge was coming up with a name. The original name when I made the first draft was "Everything Is Harder Than It Looks," which I still think is a cool title but doesn't really go with this song very well. The image I saw in my head to go with the music was of a cartoon rocket ship taking off, like maybe on Little Einsteins or a show like that, and I thought of dozens of titles that had that theme of rocket/orbit/robot/etc, but I didn't like any of them.

I also thought it sounded so positive and happy that it should have a title that incorporated a word like "lucky" or "good." So when I submitted it to SWARC I called it "Good Luck Machine" ... but then everyone thought it was talking about gambling, so I scratched that. Then for a long time I called it "Good Luck Space Truck" ... but that seemed to hang loosely and I was never really sure I liked it.

Finally I landed on "Sugar High," which is fun and a bit cartoony, and I liked it well enough, and by then I had kind of stopped caring. Now I've put it in a video so I'm not changing it again!