Houdini

This project started out by Shaun picking from a handful of instrumentals. The beat started out very simple, with the saxophone and bass being the main drivers. I chose to record the instruments myself for this beat — the sax, the synth bassline. It’s processed in a way that makes it feel like it was sampled from another record, but it’s got personality and presence without outshining the vocals.

He really brought a cool, modern R&B style to this and as we put this record together I was constantly adapting to the various styles he expressed through his vocals.

We did about 4 iterations to get the right drums in the right places to keep the track moving, and adding synths to make the chorus stand out more.

Shaun also wanted album art, social media clips, and possibly a full music video. I started off by working with an artist friend of mine to create cover art based on a concept that Shaun and I came up with. The idea came from old Harry Houdini posters — exploring the concept of the escape artist.

We wanted to create more engaging content around the song, so we continued this concept and came up with a character concept for a video that combined this old-school Houdini feel with a more modern James Bond type character.

I grew up on early 90’s style animation like Batman, and wanted to create something in that space for the song. But rather than a hero character, I wrote this one as more of an antihero escaping his own fate and discovering his own power to fight against those who want to keep him trapped.

I explored a carefully guided GenAI process where I scripted each take of each scene, and used our original concept art to fuel the Claude + Higgsfield image and video creation.