Lullaby was originally released under the name DFEX, before I started releasing music under my legal name, Wylan Shoemaker.
I wrote it during a period of my life when almost everything felt uncertain.
I had just relocated to a new state, I was struggling financially, and there were times when even basic things like food were difficult to afford. I remember surviving on pieces of bread I could get from the dollar store and free bottles of water from work. It was not exactly the kind of situation that made chasing a career in music feel particularly sensible.
At the same time, I was getting a lot of criticism about the kind of music I wanted to make. I heard that it was “too serious,” “too depressing,” “not happy enough,” and, somehow, “not danceable.” That last one still makes me laugh a little because I was never trying to write dance music in the first place.
What bothered me was not simply that people disliked the music. I could handle that. It was the feeling that the things I was deliberately choosing, the darker tone, the restraint, the emotional weight, were being treated like mistakes. Instead of hearing, “this is not for me,” I often felt like I was hearing, “you are doing this wrong.”
After hearing that enough times, it started getting into my head.
I began questioning whether my instincts as a composer were actually any good. Maybe I was taking everything too seriously. Maybe the music really was too bleak. Maybe I needed to make something happier, more accessible, more energetic, or apparently more danceable if I ever wanted anyone to care about what I was doing.
At that point in my life, stress had become a constant background noise. I had gone through some major changes, lost a job that meant a lot to me, and I honestly do not think I was in a very good state of mind. Sleep became difficult because even when everything around me was quiet, my head usually was not.
I found a lot of solace in writing during that time, although not necessarily with words. I have never been particularly good at explaining how I feel, and I am still not. Music has always made more sense to me that way. Sitting at a keyboard, picking up a guitar, or really playing any instrument has always felt like a more natural way to communicate something when I cannot figure out how to put it into a sentence.
That is really where Lullaby came from.
I was not trying to write about stress, insomnia, or self-doubt in some abstract way. I was taking what I was feeling and putting it somewhere. I could not always explain what was going on in my head, but I could play it.
Rather than trying to make something lighter, especially after being told that was what my music supposedly needed, I went further in the opposite direction. I stripped the piece back and leaned into what I was already feeling.
For me, Lullaby is not really a peaceful bedtime song. It is about the weight that keeps you awake. It is lying there exhausted, knowing you need to sleep, while your brain keeps finding one more thing to worry about. One thought turns into another, then another, until suddenly you are replaying decisions, questioning yourself, thinking about tomorrow, thinking about yesterday, and wondering why you cannot just shut it all off.
The song was also my first serious attempt at working in Logic Pro X on a MacBook Pro. I was still learning the software and adjusting to a completely different workflow, so there was a lot of experimentation involved. I wrote the track entirely with BBC Symphony Orchestra, Damage 2, and Heavyocity Piano.
One of the biggest changes I made was the percussion.
I killed off a lot of the complicated drum writing I had been doing at the time, or what I have jokingly been told were my “percussive acrobatics,” and went with something much more stripped back. Instead of having percussion constantly driving everything forward, the drums became heavier, simpler, and much more deliberate. They were there to punctuate the emotion rather than constantly compete for attention.
The piece starts with a solitary, intimate piano. It is small and exposed, almost like a single thought sitting by itself. A bass drum begins to creep into that space, and then, at the crack of a bell, the strings come rushing in.
That progression probably says more about where my head was at the time than I realized when I wrote it.
The quiet does not get much of a chance to exist. It gets drowned out almost immediately. One thing enters, then another, then another, and suddenly everything is spiraling around itself. It keeps building until all of those different ideas finally slam together into the chorus.
That chorus has become one of my favorite parts of the piece for that reason. The chaos does not disappear. All of the things that were piling on top of each other are still there. They just suddenly make sense together.
I did not sit down and consciously plan that symbolism. I was not thinking, “this instrument represents this thought” or trying to build some elaborate metaphor into the arrangement. Most of it came from instinct and from what felt right while I was writing.
Looking back, though, it is hard for me not to hear myself in it.
My thoughts rarely arrived one at a time during that period. They piled on top of each other until everything felt overwhelming. Writing music gave me somewhere to put all of that noise. It let me take things that felt scattered and disorganized in my head and turn them into something with structure.
Around that time, I wrote a line that probably explains my mindset better than anything else I could say:
“My mind is a mess of self-doubt, but even fragmented thoughts can still turn into something beautiful.”
That became the heart of Lullaby for me.
The song did not fix anything. I was still broke. I was still questioning myself. I was still hearing criticism, still struggling to sleep, and still wondering whether all of the time I was putting into music would ever actually lead somewhere.
But I had made something out of it.
When I listen to Lullaby now, I hear a version of myself who had very little certainty about where his life was going, but kept creating anyway. Someone who was tired, stressed, frustrated, and scared that he might be wasting his time, but who could still sit down at a keyboard and turn some of that mess into music.
I think that is why the song still means so much to me. It came from a time when I did not really know what I was doing next, and I did not have a particularly good way of explaining what was going on in my head. Writing music gave me one.
I do not think Lullaby was ever meant to solve any of that. It was just where those feelings ended up.