Introduction

What does love mean to you? This capstone aims to investigate the artist's feelings on herrelationship with love and romance, with the aim of answering the question “How does life experience and identity affect personal beliefs about love?” This three song EP presents different aspects of how love manifests itself in the artist's life, and how her identity has an impact on her views of love.

Literature Review

The work is inspired by other songs like “Falling Behind” by Laufey, which expresses the feeling of being left behind as other people around you start to hit major relationship milestones whilst never having been in a relationship. Songs like this touch on or have the same spirit as the work, the idea of “unconventional love”. The capstone also draws on ideas found in “Being asexual” by McKeever and Brunning, which is an in depth discussion of the many variations of sexual and romantic desire an asexual person can feel, and how it might impact their decisions to enter romantic relationships or sexual encounters. Asexuality is not the same for every person, and asexual people must consider more things than allosexual people when entering or not entering intimate relationships.

Methods

This capstonewas created through the use of artistic methods like songwriting, which is all the things involved with the creation of a song, more specifically a pop song, which is the main style the artist writes in. The artist also draws upon techniques that she learned in a workshop she took on songwriting for aspects like coming up with melodies and drafting lyrics.

Other methods include research methods like media review, where the artist looks at other songs and find elements and techniques she want to emulate in my work.

Audience and Impact

The audience is a general listening audience who likes music, specifically in the indie genre. However this EP is also meant to reach people who may also have unconventional relationships with love like the artist does. It shows general audiences that love can come in many forms, and that there is no cookie cutter relationship. Your relationships with the people in your life are individual and special. It also shows people who feel similarly about love to the artist that they are seen and heard in music, and their ways of showing love and having relationships are valid and do exist. Finally this project is for the artists own satisfaction, to have written finished music, as she has been wanting to write more music for a while.

References

Conan Gray. “People Watching.” Superache, Republic Records, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noJ4I3RBoEY.

Laufey. “Falling Behind.” Everything I Know About Love, AWAL, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej8RhiSv2-4.

McKeever, Natasha, and Luke Brunning. "Being asexual." aeon, edited by Nigel Warburton, Aeon Media Group Ltd., 19 Nov. 2019, 

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I want to thank my faculty advisor Heather for helping guide me through the confusing and overwhelming process of creation. I also want to thank all of the friends who have supported me along the way, even if just for emotional support when the writing process got rough. Finally I want to thank my light side of the moon, for inspiring my music and reading through all of the drafts and revisions that my work has gone through, and most importantly for always being there and understanding my mind as I tried to convey my emotions and thoughts on paper.