In short, ‘Ordinary Day’ tells the story of a movie star who drops everything to start a new life in Rio after discovering a secret about her husband.

Listen to the song here.

Philosophically, the message of the song is the fact that despite your best efforts, you may not succeed in life. I chose this story because all the tracks in the ‘Player Characters’ album deal with the theme of duality, and I needed ‘Ordinary Day’ to incorporate this theme as well.

Third, from a production standpoint, the origins of ‘Ordinary Day’ were relatively straightforward compared to the chaotic creative process behind ‘Landscape Fantasy’.

I got the idea for “Ordinary Day” from old notes I had kept on my hard drive from the TV series ‘Desperate Housewives’ from the early 2000s. I remember feeling that I might want to create something based on these notes eventually, and here we are.

What made the ‘Desperate Housewives’ series special for me was that each episode began with a narrator setting the tone for the story. I found this approach fascinating – the narrator’s voice was very feminine and tender, yet slightly sad, and the stories she told at the beginning of each episode strongly contrasted with the story itself. This cleverly underscored the desperation of these American housewives’ lives, where everyone wanted to have everything: career, husband, success, family, and the perfect appearance, and everybody had a hard time keeping the appearances.

One episode in particular, season 3, episode 7 from 2006, stuck with me.

It began: ‘It was supposed to be an ordinary day for Carolyn Bigsby. She had planned to bake her husband a strudel, give her dog a bath, and water her African violets. Yes, Carolyn had planned to do all sorts of things she thought mattered. But earlier that day, a woman who wasn’t her friend told Carolyn something she wasn’t supposed to hear. From that moment on, Carolyn felt that nothing really mattered anymore.’

These words kept surfacing in my memory over the years, and when the time came to find a song for an idea I had called ‘Virtue lies defeated’, I knew it was time to get on with this.

Writing the lyrics came relatively easily.

When I started working with Juho, the producer for my album ‘Player Characters’, the song came together quickly (unlike OTHER songs). I gave Strawberry Switchblade’s ‘Who Knows What Love Is’ as a reference point to Juho, because I wanted to create contrast between how the song would sound and what it would be about, similar to all the ‘Player Character’ tracks.

I’m very pleased with the end result, especially with how the song develops from the desperate setting in the beginning to the sense of freedom in the end.

But that was just half of the journey.

As an independent music artist, writing the song is only half the battle. Promotion is a crucial part of getting music out there, and it’s a lot of work, because nowadays we need to treat each single as a standalone piece of art.

So, to create a universe around ‘Ordinary Day’, I started thinking about what kind of person would describe their day as ordinary, with activities like wining and dining, attending the ballet, giving their dog a bath, and reading hate mail, and I realized: a famous actress, perhaps a young, successful Latina woman in a telenovela, given the reference to ‘rock in Rio and dancing on the sand’ in the bridge of the song.

Finally, I had to bring my alter ego, Poliphilos, into the picture, as it’s Poliphilos who seems to be the narrator in ‘Ordinary Day’ as well.

To bind the song and my ideas together, I always accompany the Journey articles with About articles. The former are fictional stories about how Poliphilos found the idea for the song, while the latter explain the technicalities of the production as Harri, the real person.

According to the Journey story, Poliphilos went to Hollywood to help his movie director friend, who was trying to make it big by directing films that dealt with deep societal issues. However, with the rise of new mass media, people were more interested in UFOs, aliens, monsters, and crazy politics.

To express this with visuals, I conceived a celebrity gossip magazine called ‘Ordinary Day’, featuring scandalous stories and outrageous happenings from the lives of three actors and actresses from a telenovela-style sitcom: Eva Mendez, Marion Smith, and Carlos Ramirez.

Eva is married to Carlos on and off-screen, while Marion is Eva’s best friend, but only on the surface. All of them just want to act, get paid, and break into the big screen, but the media wants to sell magazines, so they send paparazzi after them and create stories that are more or less – but mostly more – far from the truth.

To complete the magazine, I needed headlines and to enhance the realism of the content, I googled some of the craziest actual newspaper and tabloid magazine headlines from recent years and found a treasure trove of monsters, giant animals, aliens, conspiracy theories, and more. I used these to create a list of potential headlines for ‘Ordinary Day’ magazine, such as:

– ‘Polterkite terrorizes Central Park’

– ‘Legless mountain climber to climb Mt. Everest’

– ‘Humans are turning back into apes!’

Then, I made these headlines personal by incorporating the names of the actors and actresses:

– ‘Polterkite terrorizes Eva Mendez in Central Park’

– ‘Legless former actor Carlos Ramirez to climb Mt. Everest’

– ‘Marion Smith: ‘We humans are turning back into apes!”

And that’s the celebrity gossip magazine ‘Ordinary Day’ for you!

No need to explain more, as your imagination can already wonder what’s going on in the lives of these people.