My first song released on Spotify!

I finally put something out.

It has been sitting in various states of incompletion for longer than I want to admit. A folder of stems, a half-finished arrangement, a lyric I kept coming back to. At some point I decided to stop waiting for it to feel finished and just release it.

The song is called Tinggalkan Jakarta. It is about leaving. Specifically, it is about the particular weight of leaving a city that has been the whole backdrop of your life. Jakarta is loud and chaotic and suffocating and it is also home. The two things are not contradictions.

The lyrics are simple. Deliberately so.

Haruskah kumenangis
Saat aku sadari
Sedang waktu bergulir
Menghantar aku pergi

Kupergi tinggalkanmu sendiri
Kupergi tinggalkanmu di sini
Pergi
Tinggalkan Jakarta

That is more or less the whole thing. The repetition is intentional. When you are leaving somewhere, or someone , the same thought circles back. You do not resolve it. You just keep moving.

How it was made

I started building the foundation in FL Studio. Drums, a basic chord progression, the structural bones of the track. At a certain point I hit a wall creatively and decided to run it through Suno to see what ideas came back. That part of the process was useful in unexpected ways. Not because I kept everything Suno generated, but because hearing the song interpreted differently shook loose things I could not see when I was too close to it.

Then it went back into FL Studio for the final pass. Arrangement, mix, everything that makes it actually sound like a song and not a sketch.

It is not perfect. There are things I would change. But I think that is always true, and at some point you just have to let it go.

Where to listen

The song is on Spotify and YouTube Music now.

🎵 Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/track/1u7l4JSru4P7NEqAJUNWJZ?si=IaE21NFLRt6WyuU_otXjJA

▶️ YouTube Music:

If you are from Jakarta, or have ever left a place and felt something complicated about it, maybe this will land. If not, I hope the production is at least interesting enough to sit with for three minutes.

More music coming. Slowly, but it is coming.