How will you sculpt the likeness of you?
Identity, creative rebirth, and the art of becoming yourself.
In 2023, my word of the year was Renaissance.
I didn’t know exactly what it would mean at the time — only that something in me needed to shift. I was ready to begin again. Not from scratch, but from everything I’d lived and learned up to that point.
That word became a theme. A creative lens. And eventually, a song.
Renaissance was born from that quiet urgency to realign. It’s a song about sculpting a self that feels true. About using your history, your instincts, your imagination — and making something meaningful from it all.
It’s not a reinvention.
It’s a return. A remembering. A rising.
🖋 Lyrically…
The song opens with the idea that who we are is inseparable from where we’ve been:
“You’re where you are / Because of where you’ve come from”
It invites us to make meaning from our mess, to create something beautiful from what we’ve been through:
“Put brush to canvas / Paint something beautiful”
The central question — “How will you sculpt the likeness of you? / The true you darling” — became a kind of mantra for me.
Not what do you want to become, but who are you beneath everything else?
What does it take to forgive yourself?
To lead yourself home?
🎧 Sonically…
The verses are delicately sung — tentative, almost. There’s vulnerability in the delivery, a softness that leaves space for something to emerge.
But the choruses arrive with strength. A sense of arrival.
That’s where the becoming happens. You can hear it in the vocal — confident, resolute — and in the strings, which rise and rise as the song progresses, getting higher and fuller with each pass of the chorus.
Renaissance has surprisingly few layers compared to some of my other tracks — mostly piano, strings, guitar, drums, and vocals — and yet it feels like one of the biggest, most dramatic songs I’ve made. That contrast was intentional. The message didn’t need dressing up — it just needed space to rise.
The chord structure of the intro to the song was inspired by Allegri’s Miserere, one of the most iconic pieces from the Renaissance period — rich with tension, reverence, and release. I was immersed in Renaissance art and music at the time, and even the single artwork reflects that: I became a statue, drawing inspiration from Michelangelo’s David.
Still and strong. Becoming.
🎞 Visually…
The lyric video is a collage of me growing up — a visual scrapbook of moments, memories, transformations.
It was important to show the past, not as something to escape, but as something to honour.
It’s easy to talk about reinvention as if it’s about starting from scratch. But Renaissance was never about erasing the past. It was about including it — letting it shape me, inform me, and ultimately… soften me.
✍️ The writing…
The lyrics were co-written with Clare Yarwood-White, who helped me shape the bones of the song and articulate what I was really trying to say. Her presence in this track — though quiet — is foundational. She helped me hold the space for it to become what it is.
Clare and I also recorded a podcast episode together on Arting About, where we reflected on writing Renaissance, the metaphors we built into it, and what it’s come to mean to both of us since. We talked about everything from Renaissance art and choral music to orchestration, rebirth, and reverse reverbs — and how making this song felt like a shared transformation.
It’s warm, geeky, and full of little details that we never would’ve shared if we hadn’t hit record.
🪞 A couple of years on…
It’s been almost two years since Renaissance was released.
And strangely — or maybe inevitably — I feel like I’m having another renaissance.
This past year has been full of difficult decisions, quiet shifts, long periods of creative winter. But lately, I’ve been finding my rhythm again. Sharing more. Making more. Seeing more clearly.
A new season, maybe. Or a return to something I’d always known.
I thought Renaissance was a new beginning. It turns out, it was a reminder: we’re allowed to begin again, as many times as we need.
🖌️ Explore Renaissance further