Sabrina Lee: How I Wrote “compensate me for all of my loneliness”
I didn't intentionally want to write a song the night I came up with “compensate me for all of my loneliness”. I was just trying to relax and get my mind off of things, so instead of sitting in my studio set up in front of a mic, I was literally on my bathroom floor with my guitar at like 4 am. It was the most organic and effortless song-making process I’ve ever experienced. Once I figured out the chord progression, words just started flowing and I ended up writing the whole thing in minutes. I was going through a weird ending to a relationship that I thought would work out perfectly but it ended up being not so perfect. So this song was like the closure I never got.
The title of the track definitely has a lot of significance to me – it was the first actual line that I came up with! You can even hear it on a voice memo I posted that was recorded as I was making it. “compensate me for all of my loneliness” is kind of a cry for help in a way. It’s like saying, “I want you to make up for what you did and relieve me of the isolation I had to deal with.”
“compensate me for all of my loneliness” cover / Click to Listen!
JP (Julius) and I followed each other way before the song was created but we never linked. He was just a dope artist I followed, and we had a couple of DMs about each other's music. His manager actually messaged me and brought up the idea of collabing together, and the day before was when I came up with the fully written demo I made for the song. It was perfect timing. I sent it over to him and he ended up loving it, and about two hours later he sent his verse finished and written and it was perfect. This song was created so naturally and it was effortless, really.
Julius and I were really close to releasing the song with no production at all, just with a guitar. We loved how raw and organic it sounded. However a month later I was flown out to Los Angeles and was working on a bunch of music, so we recorded it in the studio. That's also the first time I met Julius, my management, and my good friends Simon and Luke! They did their thing on this record and sprinkled some magic on it, and it came out even better than I expected.
During my LA trip, I realized I was making a different song every day in our sessions and that was so cool to me. I was going through a weird time where I didn’t know where I really fit in genre-wise, and that’s when I was like, “Fuck it! I'm just gonna make music that I love but is still authentic to me.” So I did purposely switch it up for this release, but every single listener should also expect this for future releases as well! I am writing non-stop (it's kind of a problem) but I make something different and new almost every day. Being versatile through my sound and music was something I didn't know I was capable of until recently!