Alan Walker, The Spectre Extended Intro Remix, created by Walker #10474

=== 0. Table of Contents ===
1. Lyrics
2. Production Notes
3. History & Background

=== 1. Lyrics ===
We live, we love, we lie
(We live, we love, we lie)
We live, we love, we lie

Hello, hello
Can you hear me
As I scream your name
Hello, hello
Do you need me
Before I fade away

Is this a place that I call home
To find what I've become
Walk along the path unknown
We live, we love, we lie

Deep in the dark
I don't need the light
There's a ghost inside me
It all belongs to the other side
We live, we love, we lie

Hello, hello
Nice to meet you
Voice inside my head
Hello, hello
I believe you
How can I forget

Is this a place that I call home
To find what I've become
Walk along the path unknown
We live, we love, we lie

Deep in the dark
I don't need the light
There's a ghost inside me
It all belongs to the other side
We live, we love, we lie

We live, we love, we lie

=== 2. Production Notes ===
Based on the original stems of "The Spectre" from Alan Walker, provided by MER Music. Remixed and edited with the open source audio editor Audacity under Linux. Video created with Final Cut Pro under MacOS, using video footage from various concerts, published by Alan Walker in his vlogs.

=== 3. History & Background ===
When Alan Walker released the original song in September 2017, I wasn't delighted. To be honest, I neither liked the song nor the performance video with some guys dancing in white overalls on stage. It simply did not fit into the World of Walkers storyline.

Almost 9 months later, at the Neversea Concert in Romania on July 7th 2018, I heared the opening song of Alan's concert for the first time: It was a remix of The Spectre with a very long intro, a version that I instantly fell in love with. Unluckily, there were only concert recordings of that version. When I met Alan on July 12th at YouTube Space Berlin, I asked him to upload the long intro version of The Spectre he was playing at Neversea – but he refused. I repeated my request on several occasions, but he did not change his mind. Fortunately, I have to say from retroperspective view.

My only option was to use the stems of The Spectre which MER was providing to me and to create a similar version on my own. It was the very first time I tired doing a remix, I neither knew which software I should use nor had I any kind of experience. However, after a few weeks, I came up with something that was not exactly the same, but satisfying for me.

The next step was to create a video. I planned on just copying the original video from The Spectre and repeating some parts of it to fit to my much longer version of the song, and just 8 hours later I had finished my first music video. Which was instantly blocked by Content ID after uploading it to YouTube. To cut a three weeks long story short: Footage from The Spectre is "toxic", even small clips of it leads to an instant block of the full video – Sony Music Entertainment obviously doesn't want it included anywhere else. Again, this turned out to be a big fortune to me in the retrospect.

Without any footage from the original music video, I had to create my own story line. I decided to begin with clips from the backstage area of one of Alan's concerts while playing the concert intro, and to show more clips from his concerts, both on stage and fans dancing to the music. Selecting footage from various concerts and cutting the clips to the beat was lots more effort than I planned, and after some more weeks, I came up with the final version of the music video that was not blocked on upload (but demonetized, which is absolutely okay with me).

After publishing it on April 1st 2019, it took almost one year until people started watching the video. Apparently, they liked it, they made the video skyrocketing up to 10 Million views within just one more year.