Half-Light from Fractured Pixels by Dazzle Bloom

# Half-Light

Dusk settles over the studio as warm analog synths breathe life into the most transformative moment on our album. "Half-Light" emerged during that fragile threshold where healing first began to feel possible—not as some grand revelation, but as tiny moments of respite between waves of grief.

The track's distinctive pulsing bass line came to us at 2AM when Melanie couldn't sleep. She wandered into the studio kitchen and heard Josh tinkering with that hypnotic rhythm. "It sounded like a heartbeat learning to beat normally again," she explained later. We immediately started layering those hesitant string arrangements, deliberately allowing them to fall slightly out of sync before finding their harmony—mirroring exactly how recovery feels.

That pre-chorus ("Not broken, not quite fixed") became our mantra during recording. Our producer caught me singing it while making coffee one morning and insisted we build it into something bigger. The glitchy percussion in verse two? That happened when our drum machine malfunctioned, but the stuttering rhythm perfectly captured that sense of progress that moves in fits and starts.

We wrote the bridge while sitting on the studio roof at sunrise, watching darkness give way to morning. Something about that liminal space—neither day nor night—helped us articulate the essence of partial healing. Those lines about breathing deeper with each surfacing became a truth we held onto throughout production.

Listen for the moment at 3:42 when the full orchestra joins the electronics—we wanted that sound to feel like the first time you realize you might actually survive your darkest chapter, even as you recognize the journey remains unfinished. This track isn't about perfect resolution but about finding beauty in the uncertain spaces between broken and healed, between who we were and who we're becoming.

Tracklist

5.	Half-Light	3:50

Lyrics

In between what was and is
Caught between the dark and dawn
Take a breath, begin again
Half-alive but moving on

Morning comes in fragments now
Patches of familiar light
Some days hurt less than before
Some nights still don't feel right
Small moments catch me by surprise
A laugh that breaks through unaware
Then guilt floods in for feeling good
When you're no longer there

Not broken, not quite fixed
Not drowning, learning to swim
Not frozen, not quite free
Just living in the in-between

I'm walking in the half-light now (half-light now)
Not day, not night, just somewhere in
The world looks different from here (from here)
As I let healing begin
I'm caught in the half-light now (half-light now)
Between who I was and could be
The shadows don't scare me now (scare me now)
They're just parts of me

Found your photo yesterday
First time I didn't look away
Traced the lines around your face
Felt the ache but chose to stay
Our favorite song came through my phones
My feet kept walking with the beat
Progress moves in tiny steps
Not straight but bittersweet

Not broken, not quite fixed
Not drowning, learning to swim
Not frozen, not quite free
Just living in the in-between

I'm walking in the half-light now (half-light now)
Not day, not night, just somewhere in
The world looks different from here (from here)
As I let healing begin
I'm caught in the half-light now (half-light now)
Between who I was and could be
The shadows don't scare me now (scare me now)
They're just parts of me

The tide pulls back and forth
Some days I drown, some days I float
Progress isn't linear
It's waves that crash and then recede
But each time I come up for air
I breathe a little deeper now
Each step on unstable ground
Makes me a little stronger now

I'm walking in the half-light now (half-light now)
Not day, not night, just somewhere in
The world looks different from here (from here)
As I let healing begin
I'm caught in the half-light now (half-light now)
Between who I was and could be
The shadows don't scare me now (scare me now)
They're becoming home to me

Half-light teaches me to see
Beauty in uncertainty
Not perfect but authentic now
Finding peace with who I am

Credits

from Fractured Pixels, released April 21, 2025

License