I arrived at the Brooklyn apartment of Bodega Brad, a former fellow employee in the radio industry, now moonlighting as a mix DJ on a few popular dance stations across the country. Brad and I had always toyed with the idea of working together in spite of his limited experience with songwriting. Brad was a beat guy - his countless record crates dominate his apartment. I suggest a song to each of my co-conspirators before getting into the room and pressing 'Record'. For Brad, I chose LCD Soundsystem's 'Someone Great'. Brad did his homework and came up with loops and beats that reflected the vibe of that tune.

I set up my Microkorg, my Nord Lead, and a mic. I had no riffs, no ideas, no preconceptions, no lyrics or melodies. I would listen to what Brad had put together and write from there. For the first hour, Brad was having all kinds of technical issues. I was calm, with my headphones on, fiddling the with the boards and humming to myself as he struggled with wires. I had spent countless hours battling computers - inexplicable audio dropouts, crashed drives, bad connections, lost & misplaced files, software crashes. I was in someone else's den now and could only suggest how to fix things. I didn't allow myself to get angry or upset. I remained confident that we would get something down. We would not fail. Brad, on the other hand, was getting fucking PISSED.

For a full hour, Brad could not figure out why he was hearing a hum on the laptop that he was feeding into Pro Tools. A lightbulb went off as Brad sighed and cursed in front of me. The title came. The chorus came. The ethereal pads in the verses came. The song was coming together while Brad was coming apart. He wanted to quit. I told him I was counting on him. The world was counting on him. Another hour went by. I hadn't moved from my cramped seat in Brad's dusty studio on an unusually hot day on the first of May. I was writing. I was having....fun?

Brad got things fixed. I came up with bass lines, the song structure started taking form. We tracked. I wasn't resigned to any particular structure - the song could be as long or as short as we saw fit, go in any direction that 'felt right', that made us excited. We tracked some more. It was happening. We didn't fail. I added the 'Did You Ever Believe In Me's, a musical nod to my 1980s new wave forefathers, and the motto of the song. Did we ever believe in ourselves?

'The Hum' is about faith - faith in people, faith in yourself, faith in the face of imminent doom and failure. It's about belief. The Hum didn't defeat us, it just teased us into thinking we couldn't pull it off. We beat it.