This composition is one of the most important I've ever written.
I was inspired by a web demo of the game CrossCode waaaaay back in 2014 or so while I was still at Berklee. I thought it was super fun to play, loved the art style, and was an even bigger fan of the music and what seemed to be some inspiration from Chrono Trigger (one of the best games+soundtracks of all time as I'm sure we all know)
I thought, hmm, I'll try to write some music like this! which led me down a rabbit hole of analyzing the piece of music in the demo, transcribing about half of it (aka listening to it and writing it down on sheet music, which in my opinion is exactly as metal as it sounds), doing a deep-dive listen of the entire Chrono Trigger soundtrack (lights out, eyes closed, headphones, head on couch) and then seeing what I came up with.
I don't often get a chance to write music that moves around thematically and harmonically quite as much as this does, but some of the techniques I applied to shape this have been a part of a _lot_ of the music I've written since. "thick as thieves" from the Penny Larceny soundtrack comes to mind - see my previous post about that one!
In the meantime, enjoy! Dawn's RIse is (as usual) available for streaming across the .. stream.. ways. it's on the internet you'll find it