Overview

'An Imperfect Story' marks my first official track under my real name/artist tag 'Vijit Dua'.

The goal of this track is to capture the feeling of 'new nostalgia' and the realization that life won't always be as perfect or easy as I once thought it would be (Life is an imperfect story).

More

Through the melody of "An Imperfect Story," I hope to capture the emotions of 'new nostalgia' and the realization of how life won't always be as perfect or easy as I once thought it would be.

While writing this song, I had been a college student for two and a half years, and being a student has been a significant transition in my life. I entered a phase of life where my perception, goals, and life in general were continuously and rapidly changing. Even recent months and years started to feel nostalgic, as if they were a distant memory. For the first time in my life, I couldn't even remember the names of some of my peers back in high school. It felt odd, knowing I'm no longer going to be the little kid dependent on my parents with no real responsibilities.

While producing this song, I could recognize that things were beginning to shift, but hadn't fully shifted yet either. I'm not actively panicking, but I can feel a constant low-level noise/signal letting me know this moment won't remain untouched forever, and I'm in a defining / transitionary phase of life.

In the accompanying, amateurly produced video, short snippets of real recent memories appear throughout the track to reinforce that perspective—moments that still feel present and joyful, even as they slowly begin transitioning into something more imperfect while making me feel nostalgic. A looming sense of feeling that life is 'good' but knowing that anxiety is about to slowly start creeping in and I need to start taking it more seriously.

Backstory

The first version of this song, originally titled "Imperfect", was written in 2020 during the first time I tried learning music production. I spent about 2–3 months experimenting and released three tracks under the name "Vijit FTR". In hindsight, they were pretty terrible, and I eventually removed them all. Even the original version of "Imperfect" wasn't great—it was simply the least bad of the three.

I stopped making music for a few years. Then college started in 2023. I researched at KAIST @ Korea in the summer of 2024, and spent some time studying abroad at HKU @ Hong Kong during the fall of 2024. Having been away from my friends at Davis, when I came back in 2025, I began hosting parties and got into karaoke.

Later that year, I went on a couple of casual dates with an exchange student from Peru, and we talked about her experience playing the piano and singing. That conversation led me to talk about my experience producing and singing myself. Though things didn't work out with her, it unexpectedly pushed me back toward music.

In May 2025, I began learning production again, and slowly improved as I experimented. While revisiting old ideas during that learning process, I decided to rebuild the original "Imperfect" track into what eventually became "An Imperfect Story".

There is also an old explanation of this whole early music phase under the Vijit FTR tag on my now-mostly-abandoned cringe af gaming YouTube channel, which I maintained as a kid, where I talked about it around 2:55–4:00 in this video. The original 2020 version of “Imperfect” also still exists on Slaps. I deleted the DistroKid account that originally distributed those tracks, so I no longer have access to remove it there haha.