In bed with a head like “Heavy Jam”

In the last couple of months, I have been involved in an international full band collaboration. We started as a jam session and ended with a nu metal track called “Heavy Jam”.

“Heavy Jam” is a good example of what can happen when musicians from all over the world meet and put their influences into a melting pot. Nahlej, who has a background in alternative hip hop and lo-fi music, sent me a guitar and bass jam. Rearranging his stems, I added my alternative rock and metal influence to push the instrumentation further to nu metal. A style I wanted to try since the early 2000s. Later, Simon, who is rooted in blues rock and hard rock helped me with the heavy riffs added his own flavour in the solos and licks. Last but not least, StevieJ added lyrics and rap to our song and created the missing link to our working title “Heavy Jam”.

While I considered this title to be a working title for a jam session (improvisation) for a heavy song, StevieJ interpreted it as a mental state of somebody who’s dealing with low self-esteem or mental health issues. All thoughts running through a depression or anxiety loaded mind create a sticky, heavy jam. But instead of fixing the issue, they’d prefer to take tablets and smoke their way through this.
As usual, the song is available on YouTube and SoundCloud. Just click onto the picture.

The artwork has been generated with DALL E 2, but I invested some work cleaning it up and adding details with a graphics tablet. We looked for something modern and expressionistic, that I couldn’t draw. If you’re deeper into art, you will know why this picture has a crown and leaves.