It only takes a second on Google to find that one piece of music defines me as a composer: "The Time To Run." For over a decade, it has been my most prominent and successful work.

In 2008, I began working in retail. At 18/19 years old, it was my first job and the first time I moved out of my family home. I was living the independent dream, except I wasn’t. This was not what I wanted to do with my life. If it wasn’t music, it wasn’t worth it. That was my thought process at least. Despite working hard and being good at my job, I was a “round peg in a square hole,” as one manager put it. After a year, I developed insomnia, and my mental health deteriorated to the point where I felt like I was simply wasting time. After almost two years, it was the time to run.

I know that sounds dramatic, and it probably was. If I could play the “tortured artist card” without sounding pathetic, I would. My mind couldn’t comprehend a life where I wasn’t working in music. It was and continues to be everything to me.

I was writing electronic music whenever I had a free moment, but one day, I stripped it all back and played a simple piano arpeggio of a common chord sequence that has been popular since 1680. This became the basis of “The Time To Run” before I composed the original version that changed my life when I released it under Creative Commons a few years later.

Over the following years, I wanted to recreate the piece with newer technology and hopefully with better skills I’d gained since I first wrote it. This led to a couple of different versions. The first came in 2012 as “The Time To Run (Finale).” As a composition, it took the 21-year-old me more than five months to complete, as I struggled with direction and orchestration.

The second version came in 2013 as “The Time To Run Pt.2,” included in the album “Ardor.” To be honest, I don’t think it’s great and it lacks the emotion that the original has.

A year later, in the 2014 release “The Score,” I wrote a new incarnation of the piece called “Having Run.” With a different approach, this has become one of my favourite compositions. I think it is what I wanted to do with “Pt.2,” but this time, it worked. The build-up is magical and exciting while holding on to suspense. As the track takes flight in the second act, the music is much more thought out, and the composition overall shows a lot of development over the original.

More than 13 years later, “The Time To Run” continues to be my most popular piece of music, both the original and the “Finale” version. While I’d like my more recent works to gain such popularity, I am not going let the success of my early works deter me from continuing trying to write something that captures audience attention like this did.

The Music That Defines Me

Writer’s Block