For some artists, music might be an exercise in aesthetics, written emotionally guarded at arm’s length, or from the perspective of another. But for artists like Nashville’s Mokita, it’s an unrelentingly honest, deeply personal, unwaveringly confessional form of expression, an outlet to tackle the sincerest of subjects many songwriters are all-too-often afraid to address with such candor, in a style that bridges Mokita’s classical training and singer-songwriter upbringing with his work as a producer and a penchant for crafting layered and atmospheric modern electro-pop. His latest single to day is an Acoustic infused chill single called “Over You” that goes over something we've all been through: a complicated relationship. Check out the song after the jump and check out a quote from Mokita above the stream.
‘The opening guitar chords for ‘Over You’ were part of a riff I had been playing around with for months before I actually wrote the rest of the song. Its in this open tuning called DADGAD that just always gives me this nostalgic, pop punk ballad-y feeling. I’ve always loved playing in different tunings on the guitar; I feel like it opens up a different thought process when you’re writing and you don’t feel as comfortable in it which limits you in this cool kind of way. You’re stuck with these limited chords and it forces you to keep things simple. So last spring I was at my buddy Thomas’s lake house and I showed him that riff, and the chorus melody just kind of flowed out. I didn’t have lyrics at the time so we were just mumbling words, filling in the blanks, but the one thing that did stick was I kept ending it with the words ‘over you’. Several months went by and every so often I’d tune my guitar down to that open tuning and play that riff and sing that melody and it always made me feel something. Finally, one of those days when I was playing it I just texted my buddy Thomas and said ‘man, we gotta finish this’. He lives in Charlotte, NC and I’m in Nashville, so we ended up writing the whole thing over text message, just sending ideas back and forth, voice memos; I’d record a line at my studio and send it to him, I’d make more tweaks, send it back again, change a line, record it again etc. We wrote the song in like 2-3 days but I probably tweaked the lyrics and structure of it for like 2 weeks. I wanted to write the lyrics of ‘Over You’ in the format of a letter, so that’s kinda what the whole concept is based on. When I was in high school I went through my first bad breakup and I remember I used to write these letters to my ex that I knew I was never going to send. And in knowing I wasn’t going to send them to her it gave me this sort of freedom be more honest and completely blunt and ask these almost rhetorical questions that I know she’d never be able to answer, because there wasn’t an answer to them. Thats what this song is at its core. There can be so much therapy in just writing something down, even if you know no one’s ever going to see it.‘ – Mokita
