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 EpisodeThe story behind the harp and why it feels almost sacramentalHow I transformed a single harp note into a playable synth using iZotope Iris 2Building a track from scratch with:Harp-based samplingNative Instruments Drum Lab rhythmsLayered acoustic and electronic texturesWhy the entire song sits slightly out of tune (on purpose)The unexpected lyrical hook: “It’s hard to remember”The Creative Turning PointThe 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. rememberingEscaping vs. facing realityDistortion vs. clarityProduction HighlightsBuilt from a single sampled harp note, stretched across a keyboardChoruses lifted with live drums + pulsing synth bassSubtle microtonal tuning shift (~38 cents sharp) for an off-center feelLate-stage decision to embrace distortion—pushing vocals and instruments to the edgeLyrical ThemesThe slow erosion of identity through grief and distractionThe pull toward numbing out vs. waking upA return to something steady and trueKey line:“The truth don’t change, however strange.”Send me a Text Message.