Jacobs drops first track

Though Kwaharani Jacobs’ first single “parking lot” might sound studio-quality, listeners might be surprised to hear how the track got its name.

“We actually recorded it in a parking lot, in the car,” Jacobs said. “I’ve thought of creating my own original music for years and I always envisioned it this certain way of having everything really perfect. But I thought, let me just rip off the band aid. Let me just get it out there.”

“parking lot” is a heady R&B track with smooth vocals and plenty of reverb. It was produced by Teiowerente McComber, who Jacobs first reached out to about making music around a year ago.

“He’s really, really talented musically,” said Jacobs. “We were recognizing each other’s differences and similarities in the creative process, which was really cool. I feel like we balanced each other out.”

McComber said that when he heard the final song, he knew he and Jacobs were the perfect creative match.

“It sounded amazing. It was all done in one session, usually things take a bit longer, but this one just came in, like, three hours,” he said. “It was pretty crazy.”

The biggest challenge was making the intimate recording setting of the car sound right in the track.

“You could kind of hear the engine running, and the fan running in the actual recording,” he said. “I wanted to find out how to get rid of that without losing its presence in her vocals.”

McComber meticulously engineered the song, adding reverb and decorating the track with glittery synths and a thumping baseline.

The sparseness of the track – it’s hard to identify the individual noise of any “instruments” – works in the song’s favour, pushing attention towards Jacobs’ ethereal vocal acrobatics.

Those vocals are accentuated in McComber’s favourite moment around halfway through the song, where Jacobs’ voice shifts between the left and right speaker, making for a goosebumps-inducing effect for headphone listeners.

“It was really an experiment,” Jacobs said.

The lyrics to “parking lot” are simple – the song itself is only one minute and 40 seconds long – with lines including “Want you to feel the same way I do/Want you to feel the same places that I choose.”

“I think my creative process really comes from how I’ve feeling. I’ve always really liked poetry, and so sometimes I’ll find a sentence that flows, that sounds really nice to me, or just really describes how I’m feeling in that moment,” she said of her writing process. “Typically, what happens is I have a sentence with a melody, and then I build it from there.”

Jacobs said she was nervous to release the song, but has been touched by the outpouring of support from friends and family. McComber added that he’s already seeing people in other cities add the track to their R&B playlists, which has been a rewarding stamp of approval.

The duo is planning to work on more music together in the near future, starting with a stripped-back, live version of “parking lot.”

“It definitely sounds pretty different from the studio version - or, I guess, the parking lot version,” Jacobs said.

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