With a songwriting style that balances emotional honesty, dark humour, and sharp self-awareness, Francisco isn’t afraid to explore the messier sides of love and heartbreak. His latest single, Passing Fix, captures the chaos of obsessive young romance unravelling in real time, blending intimate acoustic textures with explosive, cathartic energy. Written as a companion piece to 21/7, the track dives headfirst into vulnerability while finding unexpected humour in emotional extremes. We caught up with Francisco to talk about writing from inside the spiral, embracing emotional exaggeration, and turning heartbreak into something both painfully honest and strangely exhilarating.
1. “Passing Fix” feels like a song written from inside a spiral rather than looking back on one. When you were writing it, did you feel in control of the narrative at all, or was it more like documenting something as it was happening?
In a way, I think that it was both. In the early drafts of the song, specifically in the verses, I think I was mainly documenting the situation as it was happening, which is why the second verse seems to be a play-by-play of a series of actions (“Talk for like an hour about hopes and dreams, that’s when you go and kiss me right on the cheek, then we leave as total strangers.”). However, every time I came back to the song and started tweaking it, I think I began taking hold of the narrative mainly because I was managing to distance myself more and more from the situation, and I think that it allowed me to have even more fun with the song, because it let me lean even more into this crazed, desperate, and tired character who’s basically just screaming throughout the whole song “If this doesn’t work out, nothing ever will, so who cares, I give up.”
2. You’ve described the chorus coming first, with some very raw, self-critical lines. Do you usually trust those first emotional instincts in your writing, even if they feel exaggerated or uncomfortable later on?
I do!!! Every other song that I write starts with one of those instincts, and they always tend to be the ones that I love the most. Sometimes, after I’ve written those lines and I look back on them, they do seem exaggerated, but for me, that just means that it is setting the tone for the entire song; if it feels deranged or self-critical, that just means that the entire song needs to feel that way, and I just need to lean into that, which is what happened with Passing Fix.
Writing songs tends to make me feel as if I’m navigating some kind of maze or doing a puzzle, and I need to find the pieces that fit into the ones I already have. From the moment I begin writing a song, to when it is released, so much time has passed that I manage to find some distance between the way that I am feeling now and how I felt when I was first writing it, which is why when I listen to or perform them, it ends up feeling like I am playing some sort of portrayal of a characterisation of who I was, so it is not as uncomfortable as it would have been had they been released from the moment they were initially written.
3. There’s a dark humour running through the lyrics. Did that come naturally while you were writing, or was it something you used deliberately to soften how intense the subject matter is?
When I first wrote the chorus, I think it came out naturally just because I would describe myself as the kind of person who tries to laugh at oneself. However, when I read through the chorus and saw what I had done with it, I found it very cool and interesting, so I decided to lean into it, especially when working on the bridge and outro of the song. And this is something that happens to me a lot: I’ll come up with some sort of trick, or pun, or turn of phrase completely by accident, and later on find it witty or interesting and lean into it to enhance the meaning of the song. In “Passing Fix”, it began with the chorus being a sort of dark, humorous word-vomit rant, and from the moment I noticed that, I deliberately decided to use it for the entire song so that when hearing it for the first time, you don’t really realise what is happening, but when you stop and listen to the lyrics and what I’m actually saying you realise the intensity of the song in itself.
4. You mentioned wanting “Passing Fix” to feel like the emotional aftermath of your song “21/7”. Do you think of those songs as a kind of before-and-after story, or did they overlap more than you expected while writing them?
I see these songs as the before-and-aftermath of the story. In both of the songs, I try to play this exaggerated characterisation of what obsessive young love is. “21/7” is written from the perspective of this exaggerated, obsessive, love-bombing type of sentiment that tends to
appear at the start of many young relationships and just screams “We’re perfect together, you’re the one, we’re going to get married, we’re going to last…” when in reality it will not last. “Passing Fix” is an exaggeration of the direct feeling of the ending and aftermath of the relationship; it’s the “What’s happened here? If not you, then no one. What the f*ck?” whilst also leaning into that obsession and craziness of the previous song. I also think both of these songs work so well with one another, mainly because I wrote them pretty much at the same time, which I think allowed me quite a lot to play with and make nods between both songs.
5. The production builds from intimate acoustic textures into something almost chaotic and shouted. Was that shift something you planned early on, or did it emerge after the lyrics were finished?
It emerged during the song’s writing process. For this album, I would usually work on the production of the song after I had a complete rough draft of its lyrics, having some sort of clear vision of what I wanted its production to feel and sound like, and with “Passing Fix”, whilst I was writing it, I realised that it was the kind of song that tended to start (production-wise) slowly and then would build upon itself in chaos till it you would just drown in it. I also knew that I wanted this song to be heavily connected to “21/7”, so it felt like a prerequisite to start with some sort of acoustic guitar base similar to that of “21/7” and then build on that as the song went on.
6.There’s a lot of self-awareness in the writing, almost like you’re observing your own behaviour while also being caught in it. Does that level of self-analysis make it easier to write songs, or harder to stay honest?
I think it makes it easier for me to begin writing the songs and let the words and feelings bleed into the page. In terms of “Passing Fix”, while I was writing and producing it, it felt more like a caricature and extensive exaggeration of how I felt in the moment. I tried to hide how I was feeling and the vulnerability and honesty of the song through dark humour, which I think also enhances the meaning of the song, as it can kind of reflect how we sometimes throw ourselves into extremes, or exaggerate with humour how we truly feel to make those feelings and ourselves seem less vulnerable. In the case of other songs, like, for example, “The Day That You Left”, that level of self-analysis and narration of events made the song even more personal or honest, putting me in a scary position where I ended up feeling even more vulnerable.
