Original songs by me

AZZALEE!

(author's notes numbered in comments)* [these notes are an extension of some phrases. they don't necessarily need to be visited unless you want additional fun facts]

my name is AZZALEE! i am a 20 year old artist who started making music in July of 2023. you don't have to read this intro. honestly i'd rather you scroll, check out my music, and become a fan. however, this is for the ones who care.*

i've always loved music. since i could remember, i would dress up, sing songs, and pretend i was performing on stage (1)*. i was really shy, so i did it in secret because i didn't want people to know about my passion (2)*. although i wanted to become a singer, i've always hated my voice, so i thought that i couldn't go anywhere with it (3)*.  there was never a time when i wasn't listening to music. i watched the music countdowns every single day, and every award show to exist every year (4)*. as i got older, i stopped paying as much attention to the music scene, but i still loved it and listened to it all the time.

near the end of 2021 i started feeling like my purpose in life was to make music. i wrote poems for about two months then i stopped. a lot of  melodies began to pop up in my mind. no matter where i was, i would stop somewhere to record the melody in the voice memos app. i became stagnant for around 5-6 months until i started writing poems and maybe a few hooks here and there again. that lasted four months. i started telling people that i wanted to make music, (1)* but i was never actually following through. (2)*

near the end of 2022, i saw a lot of artists promoting music on instagram reels. in may 2023, i followed a lot of underground instagram pages and listened to the people who were getting posted. i've always listened to more popular underground artists, but this made me more interested in the people with barely any listeners. i was specifically interested in rap, pluggnb, etc. listening to their music inspired me because they're talented people who were starting up just as i wanted to. (1)* i also listened to "to hell with it" by Pinkpantheress an insane amount of times (end of 2022). it wasn't enough for me, so i looked around for unreleased (march 2023). for weeks it was all i could listen to.

i began writing more. still a little bit at a time, but definitely way more than i usually would. in june of 2023 i wrote the chorus for "PARANOIA" then put it off for weeks. at this time i was still making excuses as to why i couldn't record, (1)* but i bought a mic and started playing around with bandlab. nothing too serious though. (2)* one day, i watched "Jeen-Yuhs" the Kanye West documentary on netflix. watching Ye's humbling beginnings inspired me to start taking my music career serious. I bit the bullet, went to youtube, listened to a few beats, and wrote "temporize." (3)*

from that point on, i wrote consistently. (1)* i wrote PERCEPTION over the course of four days in july. i loved it so much that i reached out to a guy who was in some of my freshman classes in high school. he also made music, and i wondered if he knew where i could record the song. he recommended me to two people. i reached out to one of them, and booked a session for a week in advance. (2)*

i made the engineer step out of the room because i didn't want to record in front of him. 15 minutes later, i asked him to come back and listen to the song. he said it sounded good so far, so i let him stay in the room for the rest of the time. it took 12+ hours over the course of two days to record. the engineer sent "PERCEPTION" back to me around 10 p.m. the day before i dropped it. i cried when i listened to it because i hated my voice. i released "PERCEPTION" anyway, at 3 a.m. on July 28, 2023.*