Saturday Morning
Context
Saturday Morning is a relaxed dance-pop groove built around breakfast and the feeling of a weekend with no obligations.
On the weekend you can put the burden down and start slow. The grind is paused and you find yourself with no obligations. You don’t have to rush anywhere or get spun up to do anything. Put on the coffee, turn up the music and dance.
In many ways this song is the opposite of the anxiety morning in So Tired.
The Story
I wrote this song from a place of relief. The day before (Friday) I received a call from Apple. They were reinstating my developer account! I had spent the last couple weeks trying frantically to get it back.
Here’s how it almost ended. I’d been building Reazy — a text-to-speech app for students with dyslexia and ADHD — for three and a half years self-funded. No investors, no team, just me. The Android version was already live. I was on my third round of revisions with Apple for iOS and expecting approval any day.
I was experimenting with an AI tool from Anthropic called Claude Cowork — it connects to a Chrome browser extension so you can control the browser with it. I was feeling pretty burnt out. I didn’t know it at the time, but I have ADHD, and I was in a burnout phase of going too hard on work, pushing really hard, which would always be followed by a period of recovery. I was using this new AI tool to help me with App Store Connect. App Store Connect is Apple’s portal for managing app submissions, and it’s difficult to navigate if you haven’t done it a lot before.
24 hours later the email came. Apple had terminated my account for fraud. They don’t tell you why, but my best guess was using Anthropic’s experimental Claude Cowork tool that looked like a bot.
Apple is at war with App Store fraud — they terminated 146,747 developer accounts in 2024 alone. They lean heavily on automated detection to fight that war, and the systems can’t tell the difference between a scammer and a solo developer using an AI assistant. There’s no appeal process. No human review. Globally, only 2.8% of terminated developers get reinstated. The fastest path back in is to make enough public noise that an actual human at Apple looks at your case.
It was a gut punch. Three years of work potentially gone because a fraud detector mistook a legitimate AI tool for a bot.
So I scrambled for 2 weeks. Wrote a blog post telling the whole story. Emailed tcook@apple.com with a link to the post, and a request for a human review. Posted it everywhere I could. A day later Developer Support reached out asking me to explain.
Then Friday came. The call. They were reinstating my account! Sweet relief.
I’d been suppressing creativity to handle the emergency, with no time or energy to make anything. The next morning, this song bubbled up out of the ether.
What Worked
Saturday Morning is a really simple song. The lyrics basically just list comfort food items that I love for breakfast, and the structure just grooves with space in between. Some songs that I made after this are more layered and complicated. Coming back to this one a month later, I think the simplicity is a strength — and I want to aim for more of that in future tracks.
I really love the instrumental break. I have two synth parts on the same chords — one ascending, one descending at the same time. The idea happened fast and easy. It’s so nice when the first idea just works out!
I used a sample of kids cheering. The song feels innocent like a return to childhood. You get to be a kid again on Saturday morning with no responsibilities.
Production Hurdles
Getting the vocals right was the hard part. The song is in D major, but I used a harmony setting that was minor (dorian fruit) on the “Saturday Morning” lines — the harmonies sit in minor against the major chords. I like the contrast. Despite being a happy relief track, it can’t be too happy.
The breakfast-item verses were a fight with reverb, and the OVox settings were trial and error. I ended up layering lower takes with higher ones. The song may be simple, but the vocal layering is where much of the production time went.
Impermanence
There’s a cruel irony to all this. I can’t really eat any of this anymore. The ADHD diagnosis led to a blood pressure check, the blood pressure check led to a low-sodium diet, and the low-sodium diet doesn’t have much room for bacon, sausage, biscuits and gravy. I have to eat a lot more rice and grilled chicken. So you’ll just have to enjoy the bacon and sausage without me!
Buddhist philosophy has a concept called impermanence — everything is always in flux, and the practice is accepting it. When you meditate, you can watch mental states come and go in real time. This whole experience is just a reminder that you never know what life is going to throw at you. So engage with your biscuits and gravy fully.
🩷 Ben
Coming to streaming soon
[Saturday Morning lyrics]
hashbrowns
bacon
pancakes
SATURDAY MORNINGsausage
biscuits
gravy
SATURDAY MORNINGWaffles
Syrup
Sausage
SATURDAY MORNING