“Midnight at Noon” (Single) — Official Liner Notes

Midnight at Noon awoke to the world on 03/07/26. Listen wherever you get your music. This post provides an inside look at the song, illustrating the lyrics, construction, credits, and colophon. For any curious souls or cultural foragers out there, this carries on the Liner Notes trend of my last two originals, which you can access here.

As an artist, taking the time to type these notes offers an opportunity to reflect on my work and memorialize it in a meaningful way, supplementing the release and relaying extra context for the listener. Depending on the track and occasion, there is always more or less (sometimes nothing) to talk about. In any case, if you resonate with the song and/or post, please drop a memo in the comment section below.

Background and Songwriting:

After the release of “Dawn of the Augur” and a February full of fotoplayer streams, I decided to dig up some old demos and discovered a melodic beat made on Koala using a sample of Grandpa’s harpsichord. The beat had been stored on my iPhone for several months before I resolved to fleshing it out as a full song. That’s where the intensive individual journey of writing, recording, and producing “Midnight at Noon” over the course of two weeks began.

Vamping a little more over the loop on electric guitar elicited a sort of homey, plucking pattern that flowered into the main riff. Then, dabbing the harpsichord with a bit of Koala’s bit-crushing exposed these bell-like harmonic overtones which squared nicely with the guitar chords, while at the same time, imbuing the track with a distinctive lo-fi style.

Experimenting further during the writing phase, I became enamoured by the way my accordion (with a phaser effect) sounded to fill out the guitar-triplet progression in the last minute of the song.

Layering EBow in the mix highlighted the accordion harmony and helped to sublimate the ineffable, somewhat nostalgiac emotion instilled by the end. The rest of the arrangement—chords, chorus, bridge, solo, melodies, embellishments, etc.—instrumentation, and production fell into place instinctively once the outro was finished. Vocals and lyrics were added last.

Lyrics:

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For this post, the artist chooses to leave the lyrics equivocal—up to the listener’s own interpretation. To offer one note, however, the stanzas were intended to ring true more to a feeling, mood, and cadence, than a topic, theme, or idea.

Cover art:

The cover art is constructed from a photo of a tree taken on my phone sometime over the winter, then bringing it into Paint.NET to suffuse it with a unique visual style. Check out a time ellipsis screen-record of the editing process and the original photo below!

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Credits:

“Midnight at Noon” was written, recorded, mixed, and mastered in 2026 at home in Milwaukee by Alex Sitze. 

Colophon:

• Instruments used – electric guitar, 4-string bass, Scandali 120-button accordion, tenor ukulele, drum samples, tambourine, YPG-235, vocals, EBow
• Production – beat made with Koala, recorded/mixed/arranged in FL25, mastered with Ozone 12.

**This track was remastered 4/10/26**